Thunder Force is a superhero comedy first released on Netflix April 9th, and it inspired me to send a personal message to the film's leading actress, Melissa McCarthy (Superintelligence, 2020). The message reads like this: "Dear Melissa McCarthy, Please stop making movies with your writer/director husband Ben Falcone. Sincerely, Casey T. Allen. The end."
Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone (Life of the Party, 2018) first worked together as actress and writer/director on the mediocre 2014 comedy Tammy. Each subsequent film they have done together since 2014 has been more forgettable and pedestrian than the one before, and this latest film will hopefully be the bottom of the already empty barrel.
Thunder Force is a tired story of two middle-aged women (Melissa McCarthy and Ocatvia Spencer, Luce, 2019) who receive chemically altering drugs that turn them into superheroes to fight mysterious supervillains wreaking havoc in the streets of Chicago. One woman gets super strength, the other gets invisibility, and the viewer watching at home gets nothing even similar to exciting entertainment. Melissa McCarthy does her usual wacky stuff again such as getting syringes injected into her face (ouch, how crazy!), talking with her mouth full of raw chicken breasts (gross, how crazy!), flirting with Jason Bateman while he struggles using his large crab arms (weird, how crazy!), and talking about how great Chicago is (talking, how crazy!). But nothing in her performance is amusing, natural, or surprising.
The superhero cliche isn't even what makes Thunder Force boring. It doesn't even go hard with its comedic moments and one-liners. Every punchline felt borrowed from another film, and every line was written (and acted) with zero energy and even less originality. While watching this film, I tried mentally listing some of its good parts...and I ended up with a list even shorter than my list of reasons to live. (Trust me. It's short.) Thunder Force is a contrived reminder that comedy is difficult. Not just anyone can make a successful comedy film. Even when a film has a pair of great stars, it needs a lot more than that to keep people laughing.
