There’s always been something fun about superheroes, both the idea of abruptly gaining special abilities and becoming superior to everyone else and the idea of celebrating that specialness by putting on colorful spandex and running around saving people from evil. Despite this, the pure superhero comedy is comparatively rare. While we have shows and movies making fun of power fantasies, this can sometimes make them less thrilling, usually looping back to a straightforward approach in the end. There are probably less than a dozen straight-up silly superhero movies and shows compared to the multitude of comics with a similar tone, which should make Netflix’s new superhero comedy Thunder Force stand out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It occasionally nails the funny aspects of a superpowered world in ways similar to what Sharkboy & Lavagirl, for example, did, mostly through sheer force of absurd humor, but it’s missing an awful lot of the elements of good comedy in general.
Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer star as Lydia and Emily, two fortysomething close friends who have known each other since childhood (the girls who play Lydia at earlier ages are pretty astonishing matches for McCarthy’s facial features and expressions, which is a nice surprise). Lydia was always brash, friendly, and fearless, but she was never much of a student. Emily, on the other hand, was a shy, brilliant nerd, obsessed with avenging her dead parents. As the film’s opening sequence explains, via a series of really well-made moving comic panels, “a massive pulse of interstellar cosmic rays” struck Earth in 1983, giving superpowers exclusively to sociopaths. The resultant supervillains were dubbed “Miscreants,” and they killed Emily’s scientist parents. Since then, she made it her life goal to continue her parents’ work and give ordinary people powers, creating heroes to fight villains. At the start of the film, Lydia is a lonely forklift driver, while Emily is the head of a tech corporation living with her daughter Tracey (Taylor Mosby). Through a lengthy, very fantasy-like series of treatments, the two wind up able to fight crime together.
Like so many of McCarthy’s comedy films, this was directed by her husband Ben Falcone, and it’s also his first time taking solo writing credits, and just like those others, it relies heavily on the lowest of low-brow humor: pratfalls, gross-out gags, protracted humiliation scenarios, and McCarthy’s character being clumsy and clueless. It’s really a shame that a great comedy writer turns out to be a mediocre director, as is the case with all Falcone’s films, but unlike some of his older work, it’s not as over-reliant and still has a heartwarming story. Some moments are even fun despite their outwardly disgusting nature. But the frustrating part of Thunder Force isn’t the vulgarity or the cheap repetition, it’s the story timing. Falcone spends a good 45 minutes on exposition, and not because he needs that much time for the sparse information being delivered. Gags that stretch out much too long – like Lydia and Emily disagreeing about whether Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” is a bop, then singing along to it, or a negligible character awkwardly botching what could have been a good joke – are a recurring theme. And those grating, overly elongated jokes come at the expense of some really necessary character interaction.
The movie’s best moments come from Spencer and McCarthy’s chemistry. They actually speak to each other like people, compared to the slapstick humor that both actresses get themselves into throughout. Spencer’s performances usually come from a calm, steady, down-to-earth place, and she carries a lot of thankless time as McCarthy’s straight-faced comedy foil. When the two women briefly banter on equal terms, acknowledge the failings that led to their friendship breaking up, or train as partners, the movie shows some sparks of humanity. And there are some genuine laughs and great moments outside their dynamic, particularly around Jason Bateman’s role as the not-so-evil supervillain The Crab. Almost all his scenes are winners, and not because he gets the best material, or is a better actor than McCarthy and Spencer. It’s because his entire character is a ridiculous concept, the kind of utter fun that’s both attempting to satirize absurd Marvel heroes and lacking in a lot of the film’s dragger parts. He deserves a sequel focusing only on him. And the film gets a similarly larger-than-life charge out of its bigger villains – Bobby Cannavale as the scheming Chicago mayoral candidate The King and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Pom Klementieff as his Miscreant murderer sidekick. The extended scenes where The King starts openly showing off his sociopathy and The Crab calmly tries to rein him in clearly come from the same comedy place as Lydia and Emily’s interactions, but they’re bigger, brighter, and weirder — something this entire film could stand to be.
As superhero stories have gone broadly mainstream, spawning multi-billion-dollar global franchises and dominating popular culture, they’ve inevitably shifted away from pure power-fantasy escapism. More and more often, filmmakers and show runners feel a need to deeply interrogate the nature of superhero narratives, using them as metaphors for the way power and responsibility affects grief and parenting, and just about everything else under the sun. Thunder Force at its best feels like a corrective, an attempt to just let heroes and villains be dumb, simple fun for once. It’s almost as if being a superhero is hard, but being funny is much harder.
2/5 STARS