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Melissa McCarthy is Wasting Her Talent Making Her Husband’s Shitty Movies

“Writer-director” Ben Falcone is dragging her down

Melissa McCarthy’s performance in 2011's Bridesmaids was a scene-stealing whirlwind of unbridled sexual energy and frenetic Farley-ian physicality, one saturated with a maniacal willingness to do anything in service of a laugh — the more perverse the better. It was clear then that we were witnessing the birth of a comedic legend, the sort of talent that comes along once a generation and changes everything.

So what the hell happened?

I have been irrationally angry since reading Hogan Torah’s review of the new McCarthy flick Thunder Force, a film which may somehow be worse than Tammy or The Boss. I’m disappointed but not surprised. As any McCarthy fan knows, her new comedies always suck.

It’s not that McCarthy is any less funny, and she still willingly lays it all out — if she has any shame, she hides it well. That’s a large part of her charm, the chaos behind the mother-next-door façade. It’s her choice of films that is rotten. You can put lipstick on a turd but it will just sit there stinking.

She capitalized on her Bridesmaids success with hilarious turns in The Heat (2013) and Spy (2015). A case could be made for Ghostbusters (2016), but it was mostly just okay, the sort of middling big box office flick celebrities acquiesce to because they pair with a nice payday. Only in a filmography so parched of laughs would Ghostbusters (again, 2016) be considered a highlight. But here we are.

Comedy is a notoriously hard genre to get right. Humor is subjective, and what’s funny on the page may not work when brought to life. Every great comedian eventually makes duds — Eddie Murphy’s bad-to-worse Beverly Hills Cop sequels, the incredible Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly duo losing the funny in Holmes & Watson, Kevin Hart flunking Night School — but those are anomalies in otherwise stellar careers.

McCarthy hasn’t made a good comedy since Spy. Which, again, was in 2015.

So again, what happened?

Ben Falcone happened.

Falcone is McCarthy’s long-time husband. You might actually recognize him as he has a tendency to pop-up in supporting roles in most (all?) of her projects, most notably as the buttoned-up air marshal in Bridesmaids that McCarthy’s character seduces. This practice goes all the way back to Gilmore Girls. There’s nothing wrong with riding the coattails of your talented and successful significant other, of course, especially in such small doses. It could even be said to be kinda endearing.

The problem is, Falcone doesn’t seem content to just be some rando popping in for a scene and exiting stage left. At some point, it seems he decided he was also a writer-director? And so he wrote and/or directed some really crappy movies, and I guess the only way he could get them made was beg his wife to star in them?

Rotten Tomatoes is not the best barometer of quality, especially for comedies — most critics wouldn’t know a good dick joke if it hit them across the face (yes, that was a Bridesmaids reference). I tend to favor audience scores generally, and especially for comedies. In the case of Falcone’s films, the scores bear out with my own experience.

From everything I’ve ever seen of her, McCarthy seems like a warm, down-to-earth person. The kind who wouldn’t think twice of helping her friends; I believe she is Sookie in real life and will not be dissuaded from that. So it’s really no surprise that she’s continuing to work on her husband’s content, even to the detriment of her own career. Which is a real shame.

Of late, I’ve noticed she has increasingly been drawn toward more dramatic fare — Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and The Kitchen (2019) represent some of her best work in years. I’d wondered at first if she was just stretching her wings; for all her talents, McCarthy has always been a good actress. But could it also be an attempt to wipe the tarnish from her name? To work on something Falcone couldn’t follow her to?

As unsubstantiated internet theories go, it’s not bad. But I’d rather be sitting here talking about how funny McCarthy’s last movie was than trying to figure out why all the funny left.

Eric writes about pop culture here at Medium. If you’d like to see what else he’s working on, check out his newsletter.

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