Melissa McCarthy extols virtues of bullying as hardball go-getter in The Boss. McCarthy’s latest, a rags to riches to rags to brownie empress saga, is a decidedly un-PC yet still paint-by-numbers comedy-cum-drama, written and directed by husband Ben Falcone. Falcone and McCarthy last collaborated as writer/director and star/writer on the critically reviled Tammy and if anything can be said of The Boss, it’s that the duo has still not perfected the formula. A gaffe-a-minute affair puckered with sequin turtlenecks, trite physical gags and the occasional guffaw-worthy ribbing, The Boss continues Hollywood’s trend of planting the theoretically funny McCarthy in mostly lame-brained, decidedly derivative and narratively bankrupt outings. If not entirely without laughs, The Boss is still poor enough in them to qualify for unemployment.

For much of its 99 minute running time, McCarthy is an egotistical millionaire narcissist as Michelle Darnell in The Boss. As the #47 richest woman in America, she’s made it her duty to cut throats whenever needed so that her cream may rise to the top. Among the discarded is Peter Dinklage’s Ronald who fancies his business in the Ancient Japanese tradition (whatever that means) and now calls himself Renault. This (Ronald, Renault) is but one of many continuing jokes that just don’t land. When Michelle crosses Renault for the umpteenth time, the business man of short stature has the hefty woman pinned (at first metaphorically, later sexually) and she’s sent packing to (literal white collar) prison for insider trading.

Kristen Bell’s neglected assistant Claire is there to unwittingly pick up the pieces when Michelle emerges from jail five months later to find herself penniless and without a friend to phone. As the counterpoint to Michelle’s brassy all-business bitch, Claire is a meek carpet of a single mother, comfortable being trod upon at the work place so that she can treat daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) to a life of middle class comforts. Michelle makes a show of how small their two bedroom NYC apartment is, a scene that’s meant to elicit sympathize for the single mother and her daughter as well as show how out of touch Michelle is, but continues the grand Hollywood tradition of passing the middle class off as able to afford a 2000ish square foot Brooklyn pad. Methinks not.

The asymmetry between Michelle and Claire can be forced, an odd couple element hamstrung into a film fluffed up with many borrowed comedic traditions, but Bell is confident in the role. Though relegated to handling the “dramatic” side of The Boss’ equation, Bell exudes the right amount of humility and elbow grease into the otherwise opaqueness of her character, polishing her into something of an actual modest heroine by the end of the day.

On the other end of the spectrum, we find McCarthy further willing to degrade herself for the easy laugh – flung across the room by a busted pull-out coach, falling down a concrete thatch of stairs, kicked, bitten and bitch-slapped whenever the occasion calls for an audience laugh STAT. An underlying message that bullying is an acceptable means to an end cuts through the otherwise banality of the film’s brass tax attitude and we see characters, Michelle especially, mocking one another for their physical attributes to increasingly disconcerting ends. At this point in her career, McCarthy has humbly accepted her heft as the butt of jokes and her unwillingness to push back against this can be nigh disillusioning, especially in the context of a film that attempts to be surface-level inspiring, but her active engagement in pointing and laughing at young girls for their differences (going so far as to tell one lanky 13-year old girl that she was going to grow up to be gay) is more than a touch distasteful. It’s actively ugly.

Her willingness to play the fool is fine when its at her own expense, though always frustrating in the light of McCarthy’s overwhelmingly sassy verbal licks, but there’s something insidious to The Boss‘ marginalizing its female antagonists by insulting their appearance and sexuality. This is however but one side of the picture. The other is populated by a regrettably bromide-fueled dramatic thrust – can Michelle overcome her resistance towards human connection and forge a family with Claire and Rachel?

There’s flickering moments of earnestness to it but one cannot excuse the convenient story writing that gets them there in the first place. In a nutshell, what progress is made in one moment is undone by the next. And right when you’re willing to give up on The Boss, it delivers a fiercely hilarious welt. Trade off between off-the-cuff improvised insults and broad physical gags is perpetuated by The Boss’ teeming desire to play to both sides of the isle. Ultimately, these obvious attempts to pair hard-R cynicism with a wide audience appeal results in comedy as identity theft, humor as crisis of conscience. They try to have their cake and eat it too and just figure that McCarthy is willing to stomach all that flour.

Like a fattie dancing to Beyonce, The Boss moves with a clunky cadence to a familiar beat. As the dramatic and comedic elements prove increasingly at odds with one another, Falcone and McCarthy try to have more of both. It doesn’t work. They drown each other out in a screaming path that inspires more apathy than hilarity. Shifting from one scene to the next, Falcone’s picture offers less thought to the specificity of the characters than he does to moving them along the rodeo show, getting them all in the right place for the final samurai sword showdown. Because The Boss tops off with a samurai sword showdown. And that, fair readers, ought to give you enough of a picture of McCarthy’s latest film.

CONCLUSION: “While The Boss isn’t the total balut-flavored brownie promised by the Universal Studios production, no amount of Crisco is enough to slick the Melissa McCarthy-starring, tonally disparate cram into one cohesive narrative oven. The sparse collections of genuine laughs aren’t nearly enough to outrank its frequent feeding at the trough of lowest common denominator nor can we forget its overarching distasteful condolence of bullying and condescension towards unattractive women.”