'Thunder Force' review: Melissa McCarthy isn't so super in Netflix comedy

Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone might be the most appealing power couple in Hollywood. She’s the brash comedic talent with the fast wit and the potty mouth, he’s the nebbishy-looking character actor. They might seem mismatched but they clearly click: At the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar party, they showed up in matching Adidas track suits.

Why doesn’t their chemistry translate into the movies they’ve made together? Under their production company On the Day, they’ve turned out a handful of films with McCarthy as star and Falcone as writer-director. The results have ranged from "The Boss," a barely passable riches-to-rags comedy, to "Tammy," a truly abysmal film. Something isn’t working, and it still isn't working in the couple’s latest collaboration, "Thunder Force."

McCarthy always attracts talent — in "Tammy," she nabbed Susan Sarandon and Kathy Bates — and here she pulls in Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer ("The Help"). They play friends since childhood: McCarthy is Lydia Berman, a beer-chugging knucklehead, while Spencer is Emily Stanton, a brilliant scientist. They live in Chicago, albeit one where powerful mutants, called Miscreants, terrorize the citizenry. Emily has worked for years to develop a serum that will give humans super strength, only to have Lydia stumble into the lab one night and accidentally inject herself.

Written and directed by Falcone, "Thunder Force" feels like a very late arrival to the what-if-superheroes-were-real genre, already exhausted by "Kick-Ass," "The Watchmen" and others. McCarthy undergoes a long and laugh-free training regimen at the Stanton labs, where she also bonds with Emily’s brainy teen daughter (a charming Taylor Mosby) and endures the condescension of Allie, a former CIA agent (a deadpan Melissa Leo). The Miscreants are X-Men on a budget: Laser (Pom Klementieff) is a supermodel-type who shoots energy bolts from her palms, while The Crab (Jason Bateman) boasts little more than crustacean arms and a snarky attitude. The jokes are small, almost microscopic — for instance, a henchman so polite he'll let you call him Andrew or even Andy — yet they seem to stretch on forever.

The actors do what they can, with mixed results. Bobby Cannavale brings gangster swagger to The King, a power-hungry mayoral candidate, but Spencer, despite her starring role, isn’t given many chances to shine. (In fact, when her character develops a superpower, it’s invisibility.) Thank goodness for Bateman, who worked so well with McCarthy in 2013’s underrated "Identity Thief." Mid-film, the two of them enact a preposterous dinner date full of crab-themed sexual innuendo, including a naughty sprinkle of Old Bay. It’s almost enough to make you want to keep watching.

If you even make it that far. Early on, when McCarthy stars ad-libbing at random in the Stanton offices, it’s the no-nonsense Allie who says what we’re all thinking — "I am unbelievably bored" — then walks out of the room. You’re very likely to follow.