Main cast: Melissa McCarthy (Lydia Berman/The Hammer), Octavia Spencer (Emily Stanton/Bingo), Jason Bateman (Jerry/The Crab), Bobby Cannavale (William Stevens), Pom Klementieff (Laser), Melissa Leo (Allie), Taylor Mosby (Tracy), Tyrel Jackson Williams (Jessie), and Marcella Lowery (Grandma Norma)
Director: Ben Falcone
Octavia Spencer and Melissa McCarthy, I believe, are good friends in real life, and hence, I understand it’d be a great experience to headline a Netflix movie together, have fun, and make some dough in the process. Still, there’s no reason for the result to be something as cringe as Thunder Force. I know, it’s fashionable to dump on this movie because of the way Melissa McCarthy put her foot into her mouth during the publicity tours for Ghostbusters, but she is actually pretty good for, oh, the first 15 minutes or so of her appearance in this movie.
This is a superhero movie alright, but with a gimmick in that the two lead superheroes are the types of women unlikely to be such. Oh, let’s just get straight to the point: these women are, by Hollywood standards, fat, and hence they are unlikely candidates for capes and spandex suits.
Due to a freak event of nature, Earth was bathed in some kind of cosmic rays in 1983. These rays awaken latent superpowers in some people, but unfortunately, due to the way the rays work on the brain, the people in question turn out to be sociopaths and even psychopaths. Since then, people of Earth live in fear of these villains, called the Miscreants. I guess the cosmic rays failed to awaken good taste in those villains, at least when it comes to naming themselves. At any rate, Emily Staton’s parents were killed when a Miscreant thought it’d be fun to destroy the train they were in, and since then, Emily’s life goal is to discover a way to beat these Miscreants.
In school, she was bullied for being a nerd, and her only friend and protector was brassy take-no-prisoners Lydia Berman, who is in many ways Emily’s polar opposite. Nonetheless, they remained good friends until Lydia caused Emily to be late for an important exam and those two parted in a huff.
Cut to today. Lydia is now a longshoreman trying her best to pretend like she’s content with her life. She has a chance to contact Emily again to invite her to their high school reunion, and she is looking forward to seeing her old friend again. Alas, Emily is so wrapped up in her work—she’s a geneticist now—that she forgets about the event. Thinking that Emily is still the same person that shies away from crowds, Lydia decides to seek her old friend out at her workplace. Of course, Lydia being Lydia, she ends up touching things in Emily’s lab when she is explicitly told not to, and before she knows it, she is injected with a serum that is designed to give a person super strength.
It turns out that Emily is busy because she has finally achieved her breakthrough. After five long years, she has developed a serum that can give an ordinary person super powers to take on a Miscreant. The serum is meant to bestow upon a person super strength and invisibility. Well, the first shot, the one that gives super strength, is now wasted on Lydia. Or is it? Before long, Emily gives herself the power of invisibility and, with Lydia, forms Thunder Force—the new duo that takes on criminals… and wins. Everyone is happy, except for the aspiring candidate William Stevens, who is hoping to become the mayor by being the only person that can eradicate the threat of the Miscreants. He hires the Miscreant called Laser to take down the two ladies. Meanwhile, Lydia strikes up a romance with Jerry, who naturally turns out to be another Miscreant in William’s payroll. Who will win in this duel of super powers?
Now, while she is capable of surprising people now and then, when it comes to comedy, Melissa McCarthy has only one shtick: loud and clumsy, often in the most aggravating way possible. As I’ve mentioned, she fools me into thinking she’d play a more low-key character in the first fifteen minutes or so of her appearance, but it’s not long before she’s once again doing her whole flailing-around, yelling random quips hoping that they are funny enough to make people laugh (no, they are not). The movie then becomes Yet Another Movie Where Melissa McCarthy Does Her Increasingly One-Note Shtick. Olivia Spencer and Taylor Mosby play more deadpan characters that, on paper, are perfect foils for Ms McCarthy’s brand of comedy, but as it turns out, these two come off more like playing long-suffering babysitters to Ms McCarthy’s overgrown brat character. Jason Bateman aren’t too bad as a romantic sleazeball in some ways, but unfortunately, his character is designed solely to be Lydia’s trophy. Wait, why is it that we are supposed to felicitate plus-sized women, but at the same time, plus-sized men are still denied lead romantic roles?
Melissa McCarthy’s “Look at me EEEEE!” comedy aside, the movie also turns out, much to my dismay, not some sharp or funny subversion of superhero movies. No, this one plays things straight, thus robbing itself of the potential to be both far more humorous and even intelligent. By playing things straight and letting Ms McCarthy drown all her co-stars with her obnoxious antics, this movie instead comes off as juvenile and even puerile far too often.
It has the opportunity to redeem Lydia in its final act, and Ms McCarthy finally remembers to emote like a human being—effectively too, hence my opinion that she is capable of being more than she often lowers herself to on screen—but it botches that too. I don’t want to get into spoilers, so let me just say that it briefly humanizes Lydia, only to then negate all that with an eye-rolling out-of-the-ass development that turns Lydia into a one-note snorts-and-shrieks bag of tricks again.
Thunder Force could have been a sharp, funny, satirical look at cape films that also embrace body positivism and sisterhood. Instead, it is just another cringe-filled movie with Melissa McCarthy doing her best to act like that silly fat girl stereotype that everyone pokes fun at. That’s not very subversive or smart, is it?
