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Date: 4/20/2021
On Netflix: “Thunder Force”
Every comedian or comic actor develops a persona for his or her work. They develop a comedic strength and play to it.
A quick for instance or two: Will Ferrell plays characters who are supremely self-unaware; Don Knotts played either roles that involved a nervous or frightened character or one that seemed to play against Knott’s appearance; Groucho Marx was the ultimate outside wise guy; Bill Murray is the outsider looking in; and the great Buster Keaton was the unlikely hero who always rose the occasion.
Steve Martin is an exception to the rule, but Melissa McCarthy is not.
Make no mistake, I really like her work, but she has fallen into a persona that, depending upon the script, can either work well or just seem repetitive.
McCarthy’s characters are frequently not just an underdog, but the character least likely to the hero in the story. Her characters are all likely to have a slob component about them.
In this new film, written and directed by McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, McCarthy is teamed up with Octavia Spencer in a superhero farce. The world in which they live have genetic mutations which has created super villains called “Miscreants.” Spencer pays Emily, a genius and world class scientist whose parents had been killed by a Miscreant. She has vowed to come up with a way to defeat and capture them.
McCarthy is Lydia, Spencer’s girlhood friend. The two have been estranged for years and are reunited when Lydia decides to try to get Spencer to come to their school reunion. At that point Lydia finds out what Spencer is doing – creating a formula to create a super human – and naturally five minutes after learning this, Lydia accidentally injects herself with the formula.
Lydia then must undergo training, as the formula has given her super strength and Emily takes her own treatment to have the power of invisibility. They then start fighting crime as “Thunder Force.”
They are facing several miscreants including an electricity throwing sociopath played by Pom Klementieff and a corrupt political candidate (Bobby Cannavale).
The film follows the course that one would expect: the former friends become friends; Emily loosens up; Lydia finally matures a bit; and the bad guys are defeated.
There are some amusing moments including a funny character played by Jason Bateman as a reluctant Miscreant with arms that are crab legs, but generally one gets the sense you’ve seen this before. At best the film is pleasant.
I wanted a little more than pleasant.
McCarthy is to be admired with her willingness to do both physical and gross-out comedy, but she is better than that.
A moment to once again praise physical media
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to go to The Archive, the retail store for Vinegar Syndrome, once a month.
Vinegar Syndrome, located in Bridgeport, CT, is a company that restores exploitation films and other movies. The company has a store in which new and used DVDs and Blu-rays are sold as well as vinyl records and VHS tapes.
For a person like me it’s quite like heaven.
So, I recently picked up five films: the restored 1925 production of “The Lost World;” The 1939 production of “Each Dawn I Die” starring James Cagney; “A Marked Woman,” from 1937 with Bettie Davis and Humphrey Bogart; James Whale’s classic “The Bride of Frankenstein;” and “The Black Scorpion,” the last hurrah for the animator of the original “King Kong,” Willis O’Brien.
Of these films, you can track down online “Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Lost World” as well as “The Black Scorpion” and rent them. In some cases, you can “buy” them, whatever that means in the digital age. They will not have the extras included in the DVDs or Blu-Rays and may not have the same pictorial quality.
As much as I like the convenience of streaming, I appreciate the ability of building a library of films that I can revisit with a moment’s notice. There are simply too many films out there that are not streaming that are still available on physical media.
A closing note: “The Lost World” I bought is the 2017 restoration that presents the most complete version of this seminal film.
This adaptation of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle book of the same title is a wonderful adventure film with stop-motion creatures by Willis O’Brian.
Aside from an unfortunate inclusion of a black-face character, this is a film that every serious horror/science fiction/fantasy fan needs to see and now finally can in an almost complete version.