With the rise of the Frat Pack, there was always something oddly regressive about the lack of female comedy stars breaking through simultaneously. As Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Vince Vaughn made considerable strides at the box office, the 2000s was looking less successful for women. It was even stranger given that just two decades before, stars like Goldie Hawn, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler were given vehicles to show off their comedic talents.
It meant the late decade advent of Melissa McCarthy was charmingly old-fashioned and strikingly progressive. She turned an Oscar-nominated supporting role in Bridesmaids into a string of hits, some hilarious (The Heat, Spy), others less so (Identity Thief, Tammy, The Boss). But she remained an engaging presence throughout with her scrappy knack for physical comedy distracting from subpar scripts.
In Life of the Party, she reunites with her husband, Ben Falcone, whose direction has yet to take her to the heights she has scaled with Paul Feig. As with their last outing, The Boss in 2016, there is a familiar high-concept pitch at play. McCarthy is Deanna, whose husband has recently abandoned her for another woman. With her daughter starting her final year at college, she decides to join her, age and social conventions be damned.
Any hope that third-time luck would finally enliven the McCarthy/Falcone partnership is almost immediately lost with an establishing sitcom tone that lurches maniacally between cartoonish slapstick and grating sentimentality. The script, written by the couple, plays every little beat all the way up to 11, meaning that any nuance or specificity is lost amid the screechy excess. Husbands are bores, wives are kooks and their kids are terminally embarrassed by them. It’s as dated as McCarthy’s overly designed mom outfits.
There are no recognisable human characters, just thinly etched caricatures, from McCarthy’s bag of mom cliches (I lost count of the times her actions were met with “Oh my God, Mom!”) to her bitchy antagonist on campus (who is lumped with lazily unfunny putdowns such as: “You’re a 1,000 years old”). It would be a forgettable heap of nothing without McCarthy, but it’s disappointing to see her saddled with something as low-rent as this.
There is no faulting her energy and commitment, though, as she goes full-throttle with physical comedy – but her usual tricks can’t elevate the tired material. While she’s physically unrestrained, the PG-13/12A rating means that her knack for the bizarre (as seen in Bridesmaids) and the lewd (her sweary tirades in The Heat and Spy) is kept under wraps. It seems like the kind of half-brained project a star would take late in their career as an attempt to recall former glories.
McCarthy deserves so much better and, while she’s signed on to yet another film with Falcone, thankfully her next three offerings suggest promising diversions. First, she’ll play it straight in the fact-based drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? (from Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Marielle Heller) followed by dark puppet-comedy The Happytime Murders and then gritty crime-thriller The Kitchen. The future is bright but the present stinks.
Life of the Party’s predictable and lethargic box-ticking of scenes (accidentally getting high – check; dance off – check), gives it the unremarkable stench of something you’ve half-watched on cable before. Not even Maya Rudolph, playing McCarthy’s wacky friend, is able to steal her scenes, her character as garishly wrought as the others.
As the final act descends into a procession of characters starting statements with “I just want to thank you for …”, you’ll be begging for the sweet release of the credits. McCarthy remains the life of the party, but this is not a party you’ll want to attend.
