A joke belabored is a joke ruined. “Superintelligence,” Melissa McCarthy’s latest team-up with comedian, writer, director, and hubby Ben Falcone, ruins an overwhelming majority of its jokes. Why does McCarthy slapstick need explanation? In an early scene with Jessica St. Clair and Karan Soni, playing tech world hippie dips whose casual free-spirited babble disguises their stealth mean girl sniping, McCarthy hops on a chill sack and immediately slides off like butter melting off of stacked pancakes; the bean bag chair is just too tall. Helpfully, St. Clair and Soni point out that the bean bag chair is just too tall. McCarthy tries again. She slips again. Once more it’s emphasized that the bean bag chair is, in fact, too tall, in case we haven’t gotten it yet.
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McCarthy, for all the variance of her 2010s career starring in good movies that let their gags speak for themselves and bad ones that don’t understand that comedy shouldn’t need a primer, is an innately funny performer whose sweet-hearted persona facilitates her comedic senses. Explaining why her failure to stick the landing on a colossal bean bag is hilarious, or awkward cringe exchanges with her supporting cast are supposed to make us laugh, reads as a major lack of confidence in her abilities as an actress, which is weird given that she and Falcone have been making movies like “Superintelligence” together for a decade: “Tammy,” “The Boss,” and “The Life of the Party.” It’s touching that the couple appears to enjoy working with each other, but it’s never not bothersome to see their efforts routinely collide with taste and humor.
Here, McCarthy plays Carol Peters, the most average human on the whole damn planet, whose life is upturned when she’s accosted by a deific artificial intelligence that simply identifies itself as “Super Intelligence” and speaks in James Corden’s robust Londoner accent. Corden, the AI reveals, is Carol’s number one favorite, and the mere sound of his voice calms her down. (This joke again works in theory until Corden shows up as himself hocking diet products on TV screens in Whole Foods. He’s best heard and not seen.) It wants only one thing from her: To understand, in a few days’ time, what makes people tick, this being key to determining whether to save, enslave, or annihilate mankind; Carol being so constitutionally middle of the road, Super Intelligence assumes she’s its best conduit for achieving some comprehension of human behavior.
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Also, it’s really, really, really invested in getting Carol back together with her ex, George (Bobby Cannavale), pushing them together for meet-cutes (which is frankly more of a reacquaintance cute), dinner at the Mexican joint they went to on their first date, and getting them luxury box seats at a Mariners game plus a “hello” from Ken Griffey Jr. As makeups go, this one’s pretty good, and McCarthy has genuine comic chemistry with Cannavale; “Superintelligence” actually feels like a movie when they get to just hang out together, breezy and charming. Off in the margins, the United States government is in full freak-out mode, preparing plans and contingencies to contain Super Intelligence as Dennis (Brian Tyree Henry) sweats and flops on the sidelines. He’s a fish out of water in a crisis and all he can do is nerd out over Jean Smart’s Madam President, a running joke that, surprise surprise, wears itself out within their first scene together.
Rogue AIs are a sci-fi staple. In 2020 they’re a moderate societal concern, though really our cultural technological fears root themselves more in how technology is used than whether or not technology will destroy us all. (Frankly, enough Americans have had their grey matter turned to paranoid tapioca by Twitter and Facebook that the robots have arguably done the job of catching the country in their thrall.) “Superintelligence” doesn’t really care about any of that. It cares about pratfalls and self-aware awkward banter, and about truly appalling Tesla product placement, and maybe on occasion the seed of a thought about our overreliance on technology—our phones, our TVs, our apps, our fucking kitchen appliances—actually means for our present and future. It’s a cultural critique written after a skim of a couple of Wired articles.
In fairness “Superintelligence” could skirt by on surface-level examination of its themes if it was funny. Comedy, more than any genre, lives or dies on the delivery of its central promise: If a comedy makes viewers laugh, then it’s a successful comedy. This is not a successful comedy. It’s certainly clever: In the abstract, Corden is the perfect choice to voice an AI observing the most mediocre person on Earth as their guinea pig because Corden is himself one of show business’ most mediocre men. Of course, he’s a soothing presence! He’s inoffensive and bland, butter on plain toast. But the film treats him as a brand on the same level as Tesla, which is fitting on one level and rotten low-hanging fruit on another. The latter is more important. Just cutting his face out of the picture would’ve improved “Superintelligence” at least superficially.
Ultimately he’s the least of its problems. The greatest is the lack of trust in the audience to grasp McCarthy’s value as a comedian and an actor. Amy Sherman-Palladino helped McCarthy discover this formula 20 years ago with “Gilmore Girls,” the confluence where her amiability, irascibility, and gregariousness all met in Sookie St. James. Since then, few writers and few projects have figured out that making McCarthy work in a role requires little more than permission for her to do what she’s so good at doing. That never happens in “Superintelligence” with any consistency: A flash here and a glimmer there, neither dawning into a fully-realized character. She spends the whole movie trying to get on that bean bag and falling on her ass. Rinse, roll eyes, repeat. [D]
“Superintelligence” arrives on HBO Max on November 26.
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