By The first time I saw a trailer for The Boss was just a few weeks ago. I’d kind of generally ignored its existence, because… why wouldn’t I have? I mean, honestly, it looked terrible. I saw that trailer and thought, “Yup,” and that was that. By the time I started seeing ads for it around New York, I had literally forgotten what it was about, just that I thought it looked dumb.
But I went to the screening anyway, and took a friend. She was excited, even though I was not. I fully expected to hate it, writing on a fellow critic’s Facebook wall about how much it was definitely going to suck. I went in ready to tear the thing apart, because there was no freaking way it could be good.
And then T-Pain came out.
The Boss
Director: Ben Falcone
Release Date: April 8, 2016
Rating: R
I don’t think you should watch that trailer. You can if you want, but you really shouldn’t. It’s the film’s official Red Band trailer. I watched it just now, and it made me wonder how it’s possible that I so enjoyed the movie that this was selling. Because the trailer looks awful. And it looks awful on pretty much every level. Like, I feel bad as a critic to say that I really liked The Boss. But you know what? I’m gonna own it. I really liked The Boss.
I loved the scene where T-Pain came out, when Melissa McCarthy raps along to DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” (which, you should know, I listen to at least once every few days (usually multiple times in a row)) while dancing and showing off how rich and awesome she is. It’s probably a stupid scene, but T-Pain comes out to sing the chorus when it plays again, and they’re dancing, and it’s awesome. I don’t care what anyone says about the rest of the movie; that sequence is gold. And it was enough that I was content having seen it. From there, it would have had to go to some really bad places to have lost me completely. But it didn’t.
Ugh… it looks so dumb. (But I laughed really hard at this scene.)
The premise is stupid. An obscenely rich woman (McCarthy) does some insider trading, and six months later she comes out of jail completely broke. She finds her former assistant (Kristen Bell), and is offered a chance to stay with her for a little while while she finds her feet, despite the fact that McCarthy was terrible to her. At some point, McCarthy decides to create a for-profit rival to a Girl Scouts analog called the Dandelions. Ignoring child labor laws entirely, the girls start selling brownies made at a frankly impossible pace to meet a ridiculous demand (the child labor thing, by the way, is never addressed… though I do think that an interesting case could be made that the girls getting 10% of girl scout cookie sales (with another 10% being put towards college) wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing (I bought six boxes of Thin Mints this year, and they lasted me about two weeks (unrelated but still kind of relevant)))).
Other dumb things get in the way, and then it’s dumb how other things don’t get in the way. Honestly, if I look at this with even a vaguely objective lens, the narrative is a complete and utter catastrophe. But I so don’t care about that, because I didn’t care about it while I was watching it. Yes, it certainly occurred to me that X, Y, and Z were ridiculous, but I was too busy laughing to care. A shocking number of the jokes worked for me, including some of the same jokes that I really don’t like out of context in the trailer. Yeah, sometimes things fell flat, but more often than not it got me. And it’s possible that sometimes I was laughing at the movie and not with it, but I don’t really know that that distinction matters. The point of the film, the only point of the film, is to make me (as an analog for the entire audience) laugh. Every sequence (except the one emotional one that you know is coming) is there in service of that goal. And if that goal is achieved, then the film succeeded. It didn’t succeed as anything other than a thing that made me laugh, but it did that. And that’s really what I care about here.
Yeah… I dunno. Whatever.
I saw Bridesmaids in theaters. During one particular scene, I literally cried laughing, and in general I found it to be a hysterically funny film. Months (years?) later, I watched it again. I laughed at the scene that made me cry the first time, and I’m sure I giggled here and there outside of that, but the second time around, I was really just hit by a general sense of, “Ehhhhhh.” And I wondered why I liked it as much as I did the first time around. Maybe it’s something about the big screen, or maybe it’s the infectiousness of an audience. Maybe I’ve just got an objectively terrible sense of humor, and this sort of low-brow stuff is the best I can hope for.
Or maybe everyone else is wrong. As I type this, The Boss has an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. I am, unfortunately, not on there (yet), so this review won’t change that number, but clearly everyone else in my field hates it. As I walked out of the theater, I heard someone call it a “horror show.” And I know plenty of others who just thought it was awful. If I were to see The Boss again, it’s entirely possible that I would hate it and look back on my feelings about it right now as a tragedy and a shame on my record as a critic.
But as much as it can try to be representative of the future, a review is a document of right now. You might have noticed that it’s sort of a weird document, hedging a whole bunch of bets on the future, but that’s because I’m still kind of shocked by how much I liked the film (especially after watching that trailer… because, wow).
Yeah, it’s stupid as hell, and not always in a good way, but I nonetheless enjoyed the time I spent watching The Boss. And, really, nothing else matters.