The Boss movie review & film summary (2016)

Then Michelle's former lover (mad-eyed Peter Dinklage, who completely commits to a small, weird part) sends her to prison for insider trading. When she gets out, she has no money, property or status and is for all intents homeless. She insinuates herself into the life of her former assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell) and Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson). Michelle then gets the bright idea of turning Claire's baking prowess into a product line that will displace the film's Girl Scout stand-in, a nonprofit organization peddling cookies nationwide. 

After that, most of the film's scenes hinge on Claire and Rachel being affected by Michelle making rash, huge decisions without their approval, always returning to whether or not Michelle will accept the unconditional love freely offered by adorable Rachel. As the mature one of the trio, Bell, a terrific actress in screwball comedy and hard-boiled roles, is wasted in a part so bland that anyone could have played it. 

There are a few good bits of slapstick in "The Boss," including an early teeth-whitening scene where McCarthy speaks with her lips drawn back to expose her gums, and a clash of rival girl gangs that rips off the battle of the news teams in "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." But the mindless sappiness (which, unlike sentimentality, is a sin in comedy) ruins everything. The movie has no point-of-view on Michelle except that she needs support and should get it, and it goes about expressing this notion so haphazardly, hammering on what it imagines to be your buttons, that it makes a supposedly fearsome businesswoman seem incompetent, unhinged and pathetic.

Seventeen years ago, the great cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum wrote a piece titled "Dear Albert Brooks: Please Don't Go Warm," about "how warmth ruins comics." He wasn't talking about comedians acting in dramas—that's a different mode, and there are many successful examples of performers switching between them—but the tendency of great screen clowns to re-tool their abrasive, chaotic, even demonic screen personas, and appear in movies that are all about how sweet their characters are deep down, and how the world just needs more love, etc. Rosenbaum was writing about a man whose films evolved from hard-edged and a bit confrontational to fuzzy, but his hypothetical notes from a studio executive to Brooks could have easily been spoken to Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy and many other comics: “You can be more than a comic, you should be a star, a leading man, and leading men have to be lovable. Give yourself a little warmth. Make yourself a romantic hero.” It's a dangerous game to play, and McCarthy loses it here. There's nothing going on in "The Boss" except Melissa McCarthy groveling for affection from the same viewers who already bought tickets to see her.

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