Tide comes in, tide comes out. Flowers blossoms and whither. The earth completes its orbit around the glowing ball of fire that threatens to envelop it someday. Melissa McCarthy releases another forgettable, disposable comedy into the gaping maw that is society’s bottomless hunger for content. These things are reliable, barely noteworthy, and all too predictable.
McCarthy, a talented comedian, has quietly racked up one of the most dull, feeble filmographies of the decade. While her group efforts (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters) leave an impression (good or bad), her solo comedies are vapour. You see them and you forget they ever existed. Maybe some generated more laughs than others, but they all faded from your mind. Looking at her body of work, which includes Identify Thief, Spy, The Boss, Tammy, and The Heat, one feels a heavy fog descend in their mind as they ask, “Did I see that one?”
On one hand, McCarthy is a victim of the formulaic comedy system. Perhaps mainstream comedies simply can’t accommodate her wild mix of raunch and physical comedy. But that’s a flimsy excuse. McCarthy holds considerable power in Hollywood. She can dictate what films to star in. At the end of the day, she has no one to blame but herself for her mediocre output. In fact, her weakest films (Tammy, The Boss, and now Life of the Party) were all co-written by her. She’s her own worst enemy.
McCarthy struggles to make her characters stand out. Sometimes she’ll be loud; other times she’ll be crass; maybe she’ll be neurotic. The volume may change, but the content stays the same. In Life of the Party, McCarthy mutes her charisma and energy to a damp whimper as Deanna, a helicopter parent whose husband divorces her just as they leave their daughter for her fourth year of college. Deanna, taking a page from Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School, decides to ignore her mid-life crisis by enrolling in her daughter’s college. Will this wallflower be reborn in the fire of university parties and sisterhood, while learning a few choice life lessons? Three guesses.
Party is a pastiche of past college movies, but it lacks any specific frame of reference or unique comedic take. It doesn’t twist or subvert the conventions laid out by frat comedies like Animal House, nor does it liven up McCarthy’s formula. Simply picture a typical college scene (house party, classes, etc.), insert Melissa McCarthy, and let your most mild, comedically inert ideas run wild. The second a scene begins, you know how it’ll end. The film contains all the raw, exciting comedy of third-quarter SNL sketch.
“Sketch” is the key word. Scenes and characters don’t build off each other. Comedic stakes don’t escalate. The actors simply bumble their way through a series of tepid scene premises until they reach the inevitable concert finale in the third act. I’m fairly certain you could rearrange the order of scenes in act two and not make any significant change to the overall plot.
McCarthy at least has the good sense to fill her film with comedy ringers. Stephen Root, Maya Rudolph, Chris Parnell, Matt Walsh, and Julie Bowen bring a bit of life to their underwritten characters, wringing a few chuckles out of the script. The undisputed star, though, is Gillian Jacobs. She brings a manic charm to role as a flighty college student, easily scoring the most laughs of the film (even if that’s a low bar). She steals the movie from McCarthy, whose buttoned-down character never fully emerges as a laugh-riot.
Railing against Melissa McCarthy comedies is like shouting at the moon for rising: beyond fruitless. McCarthy will continue to be intermittently funny in other projects. Perhaps she’s best served in a supporting actress role. But if she stars in another film (which she most certainly will), hopefully she can learn from Life of the Party and supply enough jokes to match her talent.
