Weekend Movies: Who’s the Boss?

Batman and Superman, they’re the real bosses. None of this weekend’s new movies will stand in their path.

Melissa McCarthy’s movies are hit and miss. Unfortunately, she misses more often than she hits, and when she misses, she really misses. If you suspected that her latest R-rated comedy ‘The Boss‘,was a miss, then your hunch was correct – only its much worse than you ever imagined.

Many people have asked me if ‘The Boss’ is a remake of ‘Troop Beverly Hills‘. My answer: yes, half of it is. Why just half? Because ‘The Boss’ is two bad movies crammed into one. The first half is all about a powerful CEO who loses everything due to insider trading. After serving her sentence at a cushy white collar prison, she enters the real world without a dime to her name. With nowhere to go, she latches onto the only kind person from her past life – her assistant (Kristen Bell). It’s through this connection that she gets an idea for her next business venture: a baked goods-selling all-girl troop that rivals the Girl Scouts. The second half of the movie is something else. What you haven’t seen in the trailers is what ‘The Boss’ awkwardly morphs into – a heist movie. And not just any heist movie, but a really bad heist movie. Worse than ‘Tower Heist‘. ‘The Boss’ is what I call a “blank stare movie.” For the most part, without any emotion, you’ll simply stare at the screen. The content is either not funny or absurdly stupid. When it warrants laughs, it earns them. Unfortunately, that only happens a handful of times.

Surprisingly opening on a broad 3,000 screens is the new balls-out action movie ‘Hardcore Henry‘. Exactly like a First Person Shooter videogame, the entire movie is shown from the perspective of the central character, an amnesiac mute cyborg-ish guy who wakes up and watches his wife get kidnapped. With bionic limbs and enough will to boot, he’ll tear down hundreds of bad guys while attempting to uncover his identity and rescue his wife. Sharlto Copley co-stars. Ever since its brief stint on the festival circuit, ‘Hardcore’ has gotten squashed by critics. Proceed with caution.

Jake Gyllenhaal is once again receiving praise thanks to his role in the new film from ‘Wild’ and ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ director Jean-Marc Vallée. ‘Demolition‘, which Fox Searchlight is rolling out to 854 screens this weekend, stars Gyllenhaal as a successful banker whose life is flipped upside down by the unexpected passing of his wife. (Isn’t that exactly what happened to him in ‘Southpaw‘ too?) It’s only when he meets a kind customer service center representative that things start looking up again. While Gyllenhaal’s performance is getting noticed, nothing else in the movie is.

4 comments

  1. C.C.

    If a movie with BATMAN and SUPERMAN can’t make $1 Billion with the two biggest superheroes on the planet- it is a MASSIVE failure. Can’t even beat the Dinos of the subpar Jurassic World? Fail.

    • Timcharger

      Unless your favorite film of all time is Titanic
      or Avatar, then your criteria means that 99.999% of all
      films are a “MASSIVE failures.” Just using your logic.

      And you shouldn’t examine your logic, what does it
      mean that the subpar Jurassic World beat your above-
      par Jurassic Park, right? Let’s not think about your
      premises. We don’t self-examine. We just spread
      fail-hate.

      • William Henley

        CC is obviously joking. I am not sure how often Box Office Mojo updates their site, but right now, BvS is sitting at $749 million for international numbers, and its only been out for two weeks. That is triple its production cost. That is no failure, that’s a huge success.

        And if you adjust for inflation, Jurassic Park DID outperform Jurassic World

        http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *