Just months after the release of Superintelligence, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone are back with another sci-fi comedy, the superhero movie Thunder Force. It marks the married couple’s fifth film with McCarthy as star and Falcone as director, and continues Falcone’s abysmal record as the filmmaker most likely to squander his wife’s considerable talents. Like Superintelligence, Thunder Force exhibits limited understanding of the genre it’s attempting to emulate, although the superhero elements in Thunder Force come together slightly more effectively than the artificial0intelligence storyline in Superintelligence.
McCarthy plays Lydia, an uncouth Chicagoan who drives a fork lift at a shipping yard and likes to put beer in her cereal. When she was a kid, Lydia was best friends with nerdy Emily, but the two had a falling out as teens and haven’t spoken in years. Now Emily (Octavia Spencer) is a wealthy tech mogul opening a new branch in Chicago, and Lydia hopes the two can reconcile at their upcoming high school reunion. The bonds of friendship should form Thunder Force’s emotional core, but McCarthy and Spencer have no chemistry, and Lydia and Emily feel like people who barely know each other, even taking into account their years apart.
At least human relationships are something that Falcone (who also wrote the screenplay) seems to be familiar with. Thunder Force opens with some comic book-style panels explaining the source of superpowers in the movie’s world, where in 1983 a strange event imbued select individuals with extraordinary abilities. For unexplained reasons, those powers only went to individuals with sociopathic tendencies, became known as “miscreants.” The result is a world with supervillains but no superheroes, a potentially intriguing concept that Falcone completely fails to explore.
Thunder Force takes place in Chicago, where the main miscreant menace is Laser (Guardians of the Galaxy’s Pom Klementieff), who generally wreaks havoc around the city with her energy powers. Thunder Force never mentions other miscreants in other cities, or how the presence of these beings has affected society for the past 30-plus years. Early scenes of Lydia and Emily as children explain that Emily’s parents were killed by miscreants, giving her a suitable origin for her obsession with developing a formula to give superpowers to average people. Thunder Force is a light comedy, though, so the potential anguish of this scenario mostly goes unmentioned, and the danger of living in a world full of sociopaths with superpowers is downplayed.
Emily has devised treatments that can give someone super-strength and invisibility, but apparently they can each only be used once, and when Lydia bumbles around Emily’s office while waiting to take her to the reunion, she accidentally triggers the super-strength treatment. Emily is only mildly upset that Lydia has ruined her life’s work (which Emily had intended to use on herself), and instead sets about training Lydia to be a superhero alongside Emily, who undergoes the treatment for invisibility. Nearly half the movie goes by before the pair finish their halfhearted training and head out into the field, having dubbed themselves Thunder Force at Lydia’s insistence.
The training sequences are full of weak jokes about Lydia’s burgeoning powers and boorish personality, while poor Spencer mostly smiles politely and plays straight man to McCarthy’s tired antics. Those include a running gross-out gag about Lydia’s cravings for raw chicken, which doesn’t get any less unpleasant the more that Falcone focuses on it. There are random extended pop-culture riffs (on such hot-button topics as Glenn Frey, Steve Urkel and the Jodie Foster movie Nell), none of which are funny, and all of which are clumsy and forced.
Finally Lydia and Emily (code-named Hammer and Bingo) go out into the field, where they first stop a petty criminal known as the Crab (Jason Bateman), whose only power is that he has crab arms. The most inspired moment of Thunder Force comes when Lydia first encounters the Crab, and Falcone cuts to a fantasy sequence of the two in a 1980s-style dance number, experiencing love at first sight.
It’s the kind of random goofiness that McCarthy’s Bridesmaids collaborator Kristen Wiig embraced in the recent Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which could fit McCarthy perfectly. But Falcone never returns to that tone, instead telling a straightforward, simplistic superhero story that could fit in a Disney Channel original movie.
The eventual primary nemesis is a Chicago mayoral candidate known as the King (Bobby Cannavale), who wears boxy suits that make him look like a Dick Tracy villain. Cannavale, in a very different kind of role than he played opposite McCarthy in Superintelligence, seems to be having fun, as does Bateman with his silly-looking crab arms. But the action and suspense elements are as underwhelming as the comedy, and Thunder Force doesn’t make any amusing commentary on the nature of superheroes or the many superhero movies of recent years. The third-act rift between Lydia and Emily is as rote as the villain’s vague plans for world domination.
Like all of Falcone’s work with McCarthy, Thunder Force is a shapeless, underdeveloped mess of limp, repetitive jokes and perfunctory emotional beats. It’s long past time for a (creative) divorce.
Starring Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Jason Bateman, Bobby Cannavale, Pom Klementieff, Melissa Leo and Taylor Mosby, Thunder Force is now streaming on Netflix.