Super-powered spoof
‘Thunder Force’ dim, goofy and fun
An amiably lame riff on the superhero genre, “Thunder Force,” which was written and directed by Ben Falcone (“The Boss”), teams Melissa McCarthy, Falcone’s wife, and Octavia Spencer in a film so lightweight, it hovers an inch above the ground. The story takes place in a Chicago menaced by “miscreants,” evil people given superpowers by cosmic rays back in 1983.
In an opening scene, miscreants cause the death of the parents of Emily Stanton (Spencer). We then meet Lydia Berman (McCarthy) and Emily in high school, where genius “nerd” Emily and dumb tough girl Lydia bond after Lydia steps in and beats up a kid for picking on Emily. If we ignore the flagrant white savior scenario, we can move on with the story.
As adults, Lydia and Emily drift apart. Lydia runs a jumbo
forklift, a harbinger of her powers to come, and drinks beer on her breaks. In fact, she has a large beer can collection in her modest kitchen. For her part, Emily has started a major scientific corporation and built its signature high-rise headquarters in downtown Chicago.
Emily and Lydia are reunited on the night of their high school reunion. Before you can say, “Are they really going to play it this way?” Lydia sneaks into a lab at Emily’s company and manages
to have herself injected with a secret formula to develop super strength. That strength is tested using, among other things, that carnival standby, the strongman game, involving a mallet and a weighted puck you try to bounce up a vertical tower to strike a bell. That’s scientific only if your girlfriend’s name is Olive Oyl.
Emily, meanwhile, takes pills for her transformation, giving her the lame power of invisibility.
At the same time, Chicago is in the middle of a mayoral race, pitting William “the King” Stevens (Bobby Cannavale), who wears comic book villain suits, against Rachel Gonzales (Melissa Ponzio). The King is in cahoots with a miscreant named Laser (Pom Klementeiff ) and a “half-creant” with crab’s pincers for arms named Jerry aka “the Crab” (recent Golden Globe winner Jason Bateman, who clearly lost a bet).
Lydia and Emily become Thunder Force. They dub one another Hammer (Lydia) and Bingo (Emily) and go out in their Batmobile, a purple Lamborghini they have serious trouble squeezing into, to do battle with the Crab and his team of criminal dullards, who are in the middle of a liquor store heist for reasons that are better left unexamined if you don’t want to lose your mind.
Falcone is partial to crude comedy bits, many of them related to food and bodily fluids. There’s a bit about sour milk, a knock-knock joke bit, a disgusting bit about eating raw chicken and a bit about smitten Lydia’s desire to smear butter on
Jerry’s crab arms and dust him down in Old Bay Seasoning. McCarthy does a painful and arguably in bad taste Steve Urkel impression. We hear several times about how the Thunder Force suits smell bad. It is, however, funny when Lydia says in regard to Allie (Melissa Leo), Emily’s suitclad, former CIA head of security, “What’s Jodie Foster’s problem?” Taylor Mosby (TV’s “The Last O.G.”) is genuinely sweet as Emily’s tech whiz daughter Tracy.
McCarthy and Spencer have a fun chemistry that redeems a lot of the film’s default, dimwitted humor. Emily and Lydia like to sing along together to such tunes as “Smuggler’s Blues” and “Kiss for a Rose,” for example. It’s not funny. But it is goofy enough to be likable, not unlike the film. (“Thunder Force” contains violence, profanity and suggestive material.)