Female Superhero Comedy Starring Real-Life Best Friends

“A high octane female superhero comedy starring a pair of real-life best friends? Now that 52 million households are on their way to enjoying Thunder Force, I wanted to share why I wanted to make this story of female friendship (and it only has a little bit to do with the raw chicken jokes). Women Who Rule The Screen We typically see the same type of superhero story: a dark brooding hero saving the world.

Beyond superheroes, it’s important to continue to break the prototypical roles women can play. It’s powerful seeing the reaction to Octavia and her on-screen daughter (Taylor Mosby) playing smart, successful scientists in leading roles and giving young girls something positive to aspire to be. I also loved that Octavia’s character dedicates her entire life to solving a problem in the world.

At its core, Thunder Force is a great comedy, but coupled with the spectacle, action and female empowerment, the story taps into genres loved around the world. We wanted Thunder Force to be something that teens, parents (and yes, my 9- and 12-year-old) could enjoy separately and together. Offscreen Fun Can Translate Onscreen As much as I was drawn to Melissa and Octavia, the stellar supporting cast of Jason Bateman, Bobby Cannavale, and Pom Klementieff bring just as many antics and jokes.

Best of all, you can tell they all enjoyed making this movie together. Thunder Force is now streaming on Netflix.

Who Starred In Thunder Force?

Because superhero movies are here to stay, you almost can’t blame filmmakers for trying to reclaim them—for believing they can make better ones, or at least just smarter ones, than those that emerge from the tireless Marvel and DC Play-Doh Pumper. Thunder Force, starring Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer as a duo of superpower-enhanced Chicago crime fighters, isn’t exactly better than a typical Marvel movie: this is a modest affair, with minimal (though perfectly adequate) special effects, and a plot that takes way too long to get cooking. But in some ways it is smarter, only because its writer and director, Ben Falcone, takes the liberty of letting the air out of the dull virtuousness of the superhero formula, at least some of the time.

Thunder Force drags until roughly its last third, and then something remarkable happens: its gonzo spirit kicks in. From that point on, Thunder Force feels crazily, joltingly alive, as if it were realizing, a little too late, that it ought to have been a different movie altogether. Thunder Force begins with a protracted backstory, set in 1983 Chicago: Cosmic rays have instigated genetic transformations in humans with sociopathic tendencies, granting them superpowers.

Against that backdrop, two future crimefighters meet as misfit schoolgirls: Emily is a brainy loner, and an orphan; Lydia is an awkward student who doesn’t apply herself. As teenagers, the two had a falling out, though Lydia, who has long missed her friend, forces a reunion. Emily has devoted her life to figuring out how to infuse regular humans—as opposed to sociopaths—with superpowers, and she’s getting close to reaching her goal.

When Emily sees how well her superhero treatment has worked on her friend, she subjects herself to a slightly different procedure, which successfully renders her invisible. Lydia and Emily join forces to fight a corrupt mayoral candidate—Bobby Cannavale’s The King—who has enlisted two Miscreants, Pom Klementieff’s Laser and Jason Bateman’s The Crab, to do his dirty work. But her comic roles haven’t always served her as well.

It’s as if she’s driven by some false sense that her characters have to be aggressively “regular,” even possibly inferior, for people to relate to them. McCarthy and Spencer as unlikely superheroes NETFLIX © 2021 —© 2021 Netflix, Inc. But here’s the catch: McCarthy is almost always good, even when her movies are terrible. Even in Tammy, she could often get a laugh with a terrible line—perhaps one she herself wrote—through the miracle of her timing.

What Does Mccarthy Do To Poke A Welcome Hole In Superhero Self-Seriousness?

Which makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is. There might be no one better than McCarthy to poke a welcome hole in superhero self-seriousness. The Bottom Line Lightning doesn’t strike.

They’re hit-and-miss, but it’s definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life. Among the easy-to-count highlights are a fleeting glimpse of Spencer grooving to Seal and a deliriously over-the-top fantasy sequence between Bateman and McCarthy set to a Glenn Frey single and featuring big-time ’80s hair. The very basic origin story involves cosmic rays that struck Earth in 1983 (as if that decade’s coifs and fashion weren’t bad enough), creating a group of baddies known as Miscreants.

It’s there she returns as the action begins — presumably from Silicon Valley, given the size of her company’s sleek downtown headquarters and the fact that her brainy teenage daughter, Tracy (the effortlessly charming Taylor Mosby, of The Last O.G. ), has graduated from Stanford. Before you can say “breach in the injection room,” Lydia has accidentally become a part of Emily’s mission to rid the city of Miscreants. Their war on the criminals seems to be a part-time pursuit at best.

Chief among the cartoon-ridiculous villains are Bobby Cannavale’s transparently manipulative mayoral candidate, who insists on being called The King and whose henchmen are led by a murder-hungry Miscreant named Laser (Pom Klementieff, Mantis in Marvel movies) and Bateman’s human-Miscreant mongrel, The Crab. How he came to have pincers instead of hands is revealed in a first-date conversation with Lydia that provides a satisfyingly weird break from the unsteady narrative. The montage of Lydia’s training progress is the movie’s best jab at superhero machismo, and the raw chicken flesh that fuels her newfound powers is its best practical effect.

Whatever her character’s superpowers, McCarthy’s as a performer burst through the movie’s busy-but-dull surface when they can, which is to say far too infrequently. Distributor: Netflix Production company: On the Day Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Jason Bateman, Melissa Leo, Bobby Cannavale, Pom Klementieff, Kevin Dunn, Taylor Mosby, Marcella Lowery, Melissa Ponzio, Ben Falcone, David Storrs, Vivian Falcone, Bria D. Singleton, Mia Kaplan, Tai Leshaun, Brendan Jennings Director-screenwriter: Ben Falcone Producers: Marc Platt, Adam Siegel, Ben Falcone, Melissa McCarthy Executive producers: Becki Cross Trujillo, Divya D’Souza, Steve Mallory Director of photography: Barry Peterson Production designer: Bill Brzeski Costume designer: Carol Ramsey Editor: Tia Nolan Music: Fil Eisler Casting director: Allison Jones 105 minutes