Mother of all let-downs

INEVER planned to see Life of the Party. The latest vehicle for comic actor Melissa McCarthy, it looked like a one-joke story that was being extended well beyond its modest reach.

I was planning to see Tully this week, but thanks to a screening schedule that — quite ironically — had no screening times suitable for a parent of small children, I had to give it a miss.

So Melissa McCarthy is copping a broadside this week that I shouldn’t have had to give her. Which I almost feel bad about. The movie really is such a lame duck that it hardly seems fair to point out its inadequacies. But here we go. Life of the Party is the fourth collaboration between comic actor Melissa McCarthy and her writer/director husband Ben Falcone, following Bridesmaids, Tammy and The Boss. Bridesmaids was brilliant. It’s all gone tragically downhill since then though.

In Life of the Party, McCarthy plays middle-aged mum Deanna, who gets divorced by her husband Dan (Matt Walsh) on the same day she helps her daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) move into college for her senior year.

So, having put her own studies aside for the sake of becoming a parent all those years ago, Deanna decides to return to college to finish her archaeology degree. At the same institution as her daughter. Hilarity allegedly ensues. Except it really doesn’t. As I mentioned previously, Life of the Party is very much a one-joke movie: what if your mum was at college/uni with you and went to your parties?

And it doesn’t even play this one joke very well.

The set-up for the story is interminably long, considering how basic it is. It takes far too much time as we meander through Deanna’s struggles with divorce, wallowing in her grief, pining for the good old days, lamenting how she never got to finish her degree, playing squash with best bud Christine (Maya Rudolph) ...

I mean, seriously, we get it already. Get on with it.

By the time Deanna finally moves into her college dorm, I had almost given up on anything ever happening.

And even from that point on, it is a long time before we see anything terribly outrageous. We are instead treated to more lengthy establishing story about her struggles to reintegrate into the youthful community around her, the mean girls in class, and so forth.

All of this could have actually been good fodder for a fish-out-of-water comedy (albeit an unoriginal idea), but all of the comic material is either underplayed and wasted, or completely overstretched to the point of killing the joke.

Probably the one genuine laugh-out-loud moment I had was a college sorority initiation ceremony in which one of the girls has to spank Deanna with a wooden paddle. This scene was a genuinely fantastic piece of physical comedy, graced with good comic timing and perfect shock value, and I dropped my bundle completely.

But within seconds of delivering such a precision comedic blow, the movie proceeds to completely destroy the moment by overworking the joke. And this happens repeatedly, good material being overplayed, clever jokes being explained unnecessarily, and so on.

There are some excellent little throwaway lines and sharp quips dotted around, and I found myself laughing only between the “big” jokes, because the smaller, more subtle stuff was just funnier.

Some of the supporting cast far outshone the leading roles, too. Gillian Jacobs is outstanding as Deanna’s young classmate Helen, who is “internet famous” for having been in a coma for eight years, and her understated delivery of some very funny lines is a clear highlight.

Rudolph, too, is a blisteringly funny sidekick as Deanna’s best friend Christine, another desperate housewife who is loving the opportunity to live vicariously through Deanna.

But when you have to look to the supporting cast for all the best laughs, it probably means that something has gone horribly wrong with the movie.

McCarthy is a genuinely funny actor and has such a warm screen presence, I can’t possibly find it in myself to dislike her. And her character in this movie is perfectly likable. But the material simply doesn’t play to her strengths, and if the jokes aren’t lazily written, they’re lazily directed and poorly performed. It’s a bad combination. Nothing about Life of the Party is terribly original, but there was no reason why it couldn’t have still been funny. But there seems to be an assumption that all that’s required is to point McCarthy in the general direction of a funny idea and the magic will simply happen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Life of the Party (M) is now showing at Village Cinemas and Cmax. Rating:★