Comedy icons bring the thunder
THUNDER FORCE I Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer team up to fight mutant crime.
IIf you have super strength, you should technically also have super speed, because your muscles would move faster, but that raises all kind of other questions about superhero logic…” Getting Ben Falcone to stop talking about Thunder Force isn’t easy. A proud geek, this is the film he’s been dreaming of making since he was a kid. He grew up with a stack of comics next to his bed, and is now giddily riffing about power rankings, Wolverine’s claws, and who would win a fight between Hulk and his wife, Melissa McCarthy.
“I didn’t want to make a movie that made fun of superhero movies, because I think they’re great,” says Falcone. “I wanted to make a superhero movie that was also really funny. I also wanted to make a movie about the kinds of superheroes that you don’t normally get to see: women in their forties”.
In the world of Thunder Force, there are no superheroes – only supervillains. After a cosmic ray hits Earth in the ’80s and only gives mutant powers to the world’s sociopaths, someone needs to step up and save the day. That someone is Emily Stanton (Octavia Spencer), billionaire scientist genius. Since seeing her parents killed, she has spent every day trying to invent technology capable of giving herself the power to
fight back. And it would have worked if her annoying ex-best friend Lydia (McCarthy) didn’t accidentally jump into the gene-altering machine at the wrong moment.
Now capable of shot-putting a city bus, Lydia reluctantly teams up with Emily (still working on her invisibility skills) to form Thunder Force – a crime fighting duo who take on Bobby Cannavale’s army of miscreant mutants in a battle for Chicago.
“We had four stages running at once,” says Falcone, directing McCarthy again after Superintelligence, Life Of The Party and Tammy. “Blowing up buildings isn’t as easy as it looks. It actually really made me respect the DC and the Marvel movies even more, because it’s really hard to get even 15 seconds of really exciting action superhero footage!”
Balancing action, comedy and a sweet story about two friends who have grown apart, Thunder Force even makes room for a romance sub-plot about Jason Bateman’s half-man, half-crab henchman (“If you’re gonna ask one of your best friends to shoot something, you might as well turn them into a crab”), with Falcone already thinking about a bigger cinematic universe to fit in everything that didn’t make the cut.
And who would win that fight between Hulk and McCarthy? “Well, Hulk is technically the strongest superhero,” says Falcone, geeking out again. “But I think they’d just end up having a few beers together…” PB
ETA | TBC / THUNDER FORCE STREAMS ON NETFLIX LATER THIS YEAR.