"Thunder Force" makes one long for a smarter, funnier McCarthy-Spencer superhero team-up

Thunder Force (2021)

The mere idea of Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer playing friends, let alone friends who transform into superheroes, is easy to root for to succeed. There’s also something appealing about a lighter, shaggier answer to a Marvel motion picture. Well, writer-director-McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone (2020’s “Superintelligence”) never attains that same hope and promise in “Thunder Force,” a buddy action-comedy on a Netflix budget. This marks the couple’s fifth feature film in which they’ve come as a package deal—she’s always in front of the camera, he usually gives himself a walk-on part, they usually collaborate on the script, and he directs—and the results this time are just extremely okay. Let’s hope "Thunder Force" doesn’t spawn an Adam Sandler situation of diminishing returns at Netflix.

In 1983, a cosmic-ray blast struck Earth, triggering a genetic transformation in select criminals that led to them becoming superhuman sociopaths called “miscreants.” After a miscreant-caused explosion on a Chicago train took her parents’ lives, the studious Emily Stanton (Spencer) has made it her life’s mission to stop these mutant villains by developing a formula for super-strength, turning ordinary people into superpowers to do good. Then there's Emily’s estranged best friend, Lydia (McCarthy), a forklift operator whose life seems to be stuck in neutral ever since their falling-out. When Emily doesn’t show at their high school reunion, Lydia drops by Emily’s genetics facility of which she is the CEO; being the bull in a china shop that she is, Lydia accidentally injects herself with Emily’s serum, a half batch that allows her the strength to throw a bus. As Emily requires, Lydia must undergo a training period so the serum does not go to waste. Before we know it, Emily takes the other half of the serum in pill form, and it allows her the superpower of invisibility. Together, they are Thunder Force and can rid Chicago of the crime committed by the miscreants. Of course, there must be a Big Bad, so we get “The King” (played, of course, by Bobby Cannavale), a mayoral candidate who is potentially (read: definitely) in cahoots with two miscreants, including “Laser” (Pom Klementieff), who can shoot energy out of her hands, and “The Crab” (Jason Bateman), a man with crab claws where his arms used to be.

With no lack of nostalgia for ‘80s rock songs but the laughs few and far between, there is very little about this generally amiable but middling misfire that feels fresh. “Thunder Force,” while more negligible than unpleasant, makes you long for better material for these talented performers and reaffirms the importance of smart, funny writing. The jokes here are mostly lame, trailing off until they stop being funny, or they were never funny in the first place. Writer-director Falcone leans on the same tired gag he’s used before in which his wife has a sing-along or tries remembering the lyrics to a song, and here it is again with the rock-obsessed Lydia character not only singing Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” but Seal’s “Kiss from the Rose.” Melissa McCarthy does get to impersonate Steve Urkel and Jodie Foster from “Nell,” two pop-culture references we never knew we needed together. There is a running non-sequitur involving The King’s polite, chatty lackey named Andrew/Andy, whom everyone wants to kill, that never not amuses, but other through-lines only must have sounded like comedy gold on paper. Emily and Lydia having trouble getting out of a purple Lamborghini with their suits on? Lydia’s insatiable appetite for raw chicken post-serum? Lydia forgetting how to turn off FaceTime? Lydia repeatedly commenting on how her superhero suit smells because she can’t wash it? The King getting mad every time someone drops the definite article and just calls him “King” (“…like ‘The Boss,’” perhaps a nod to McCarthy and Falcone’s second collaboration, “The Boss”)?

One questions how much more interesting it might have been with a character swap: have Octavia Spencer play the sloppy, beer-drinking screw-up and Melissa McCarthy the successful and ambitious one. No matter, the two actors are lovely together just the same, and seem to be enjoying each other’s company. Cast to type and prone to riff, McCarthy still never seems to be phoning anything in. Even when Lydia makes a self-sacrificial decision during the climactic showdown, McCarthy is able to earn that moment with her sincerity. It’s the closest the movie ever gets to emotional heft or even a percentage of the performer's underrated skills for bringing nuance and truth to each character she plays.

Besides most of the jokes falling flat, Falcone doesn’t have much flair for helming the action and doesn't know entirely what to do with his supporting cast, as certain characters just disappear by the end. Melissa Leo is given a thankless role as Emily’s overseer Allie, a no-nonsense ex-CIA agent, being called “Jodie Foster” as if it were an insult. But when the pregnant pauses of comic ad-libbing and superhero stuff take a pause, there are grace notes. For one, there's a sweet and funny dinner scene with Lydia and Emily at the home of Emily’s grandma Norma (Marcella Lowery), who always thought both friends were right for each other as a couple and feels disappointed when that’s not the case (she even has wedding cake toppers ready to go). Taylor Mosby is another bright spot and very charming as Emily’s genius 15-year-old daughter Tracy, an early Stanford graduate who’s overworked by her mother at the lab and gets to utter her mother’s childhood mantra: “I’m not a nerd. I’m smart. There’s a difference.”

Having Jason Bateman turn up as a half-man, half-crustacean henchman, also Lydia’s love interest, flirts with weirdness and suggests the daring, less-conventional movie this could have been, like something closer to 1999’s superior superhero send-up “Mystery Men.” There are amusing ideas within that subplot. On their first date over dinner, The Crab tells Lydia how he became “half-Creant”—and Lydia mistakes him for saying he’s “half-Korean”—and it’s a more interesting story than the plot proper. Upon their meet-cute, Lydia’s fantasy sequence, complete with crimped hair and cheesy, over-the-top dance choreography set to Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City,” is even good for a chuckle. For defenders of McCarthy's output with her husband, “Thunder Force” might be pushing it. One just can’t muster up enough energy to actively hate it, either. It’s just a mediocre, aggressively safe distraction that could have been so much more inspired. McCarthy and Spencer still deserve their own superhero team-up movie, but Falcone making one for them is not one of his superpowers. 

Grade: C

Netflix is releasing “Thunder Force” (105 min.) for streaming on April 9, 2021.