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9th April 2021
08:00am BST

All of this happens so quickly that it barely takes a breath to, y'know, actually make any jokes, aside from McCarthy reacting to not liking needles and a weird running gag about eating raw chicken. Eventually the training is done and we're off to defeat the bad guys, which include Bobby Cannavale as The King, who wants to be Mayor of Chicago so one day he can be President (?), Pom Klementieff as Lazer (guess what her powers are) and Jason Bateman as The Crab... complete with some of the cheapest, most-plastic-looking crab claws in cinema history.
If Falcone were making fun of superhero movies, that could've been a runner. Or even if he wanted to tell a straight ahead superhero story with loads of jokes in it - something that can be done, just look at Deadpool or The Boys - that could've worked, too. Instead, the entire premise seems to be built on "Imagine if Melissa McCarthy had superpowers, wouldn't that be funny?!"
The thing is, after brilliantly funny movies like Spy and properly great performances in movies like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, this lowest common denominator stuff feels far below McCarthy's worth and that is before we get the wasted talents of Oscar-winners Octavia Spencer and Melissa Leo (who appears sporadically as their government handler).
All of this falls at the feet of Falcone, who does seem to be getting better as a director - some of the action sequences are decent enough - but not getting any better as a writer. Any laughs that do arrive are purely down to McCarthy's immense natural charisma, so perhaps the best course of action for Falcone is to step away from the keyboard and stick purely to behind the camera stuff.
Because McCarthy, and his viewers, deserve better than this.
Thunder Force is released on Netflix from Friday, 9 April.
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