After prison, she parachutes back into the life of her long suffering PA - a single mother named Claire played by Kristen Bell - then sets about disrupting Claire’s daughter’s social club by transforming it into an aggressively marketed, highly successful chocolate brownie business. It’s also about a lonely woman (we learn she grew up an orphan, rejected by various foster families) who finds love and belonging via the top down collective effort of conventional business. An obnoxious mogul gets caught for insider trading, suffers a fall from grace and does some soul searching in prison before learning what’s really important. Here’s how this story would normally play out. A straight talking, eccentric squillionare who wont take “no” for an answer.

She has always played characters that reflect America’s most abrasive, even self indulgent traits – trash talking, trash eating, uncouth and uncompromising – only here she’s traded the underdog status of Tammy for a wildly successful business woman named Michelle with a crazy hairdo (boofy, ginger). The Boss is like the Hollywood comedy Donald Trump supporters have been waiting for, and McCarthy is a perfect fit. Russell’s film about the mop millionaire Joy, but minus the ennui.

I think it’s also true this is a film that has found its moment - a feelgood story about white collar elites that glosses over any notion of culpability or moral wrongdoing to put success back on the American pedestal. How has it done so well at the American box office, dethroning Batman vs Superman as the number one film? Partly it’s because Americans harbour enormous good will towards Melissa McCarthy, a comedienne with zesty attitude and shameless pratfalls. But The Boss, directed by McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, is a comedic flatline: poorly paced, flaccidly scripted, morally disjointed.

No.Ĭomic actress Melissa McCarthy isn’t terrible in it, neither is Peter Dinklage or Kristen Bell. On another level, cinema is not the winner here. On one level this is a victory for female lead actresses, for female-centric stories, for female bodies that don’t subscribe to the narrow ideals peddled by Hollywood.

The boss movie duration