![]() Swooping down on reality television styled opening credits of Chicago’s skyline (following a chintzy montage explaining Michelle Darnell’s foundational character flaws, which seems to directly borrow the storyline used for Sandra Bullock’s character in The Heat), McCarthy arrives with an absurd hip-hop dance number (featuring T-Pain), wearing one of many questionable ensembles meant to suggest the persona of a successful executive. But not everyone seems keen to blindly support the notoriously cutthroat business maven. Unsuccessfully courting her old business contacts, Michelle stumbles on a new idea after tasting Claire’s addictive brownies by suggesting they usurp her daughter Rachel’s (Ella Anderson) peers and create their own door-to-door sweet-toothed empire. Her business is bankrupted and all her assets seized while behind bars, and following her sentence, Michelle attempts to re-establish herself with the help of her ex-assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell), a single mother who was forced to take a deadening office job following her boss’ demise. Successfull businesswoman Michelle Darnell (McCarthy) is a self-made guru at the top of her game when she’s suddenly sentenced to five months in prison for insider trading, the authorities tipped off by her jealous ex-lover and current rival, Renault (Peter Dinklage). There are certainly laughs to be had, some born out of inherent shock value involving women and violence, but this treatment barely skirts by on the obvious improvisational skills of its lead until reducing itself into a desperately feckless dash for endearment. This time around she’s an ex-felon who violently overhauls her ex-assistant’s daughter’s girl-scout troop by organizing capitalistic takeover and building an unlikely overnight brownie empire. ![]() If Rosalind Russell were around to resurrect her Auntie Mame persona for a Martha Stewart biopic baked into a Chicago set remake of Troop Beverly Hills (1989), it might look something like this goofy sketch. McCarthy, once again playing an exaggerated harridan with a heart o’gold, makes mincemeat out of her co-stars in this semi-ribald comedy dependant upon the assumed anarchism afforded portraits of female misbehavior. Despite a handful of funny moments mostly squeezed from McCarthy’s obvious knack for improvisation, this certainly isn’t a comedy for the ages, a rudimentary portrait of self-starting success and egregious economical fantasizing, which may have seem appropriate in the midst of 1980s excess but now seems infantile. ![]() Not bad for a film with a lead character only a shade less forgettable than a narrative as tepid as it is derivative. Although it wasn’t the incredible runaway success of other recent Melissa McCarthy vehicles (it cost a little more and made a little less than 2014’s Tammy, which was also directed by the star’s husband, Ben Falcone), The Boss brought in a worldwide haul of nearly seventy eight million.
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