Reading too far into The Boss.

Against my better judgement, I saw a Melissa McCarthy film in the cinemas today. I’ll be the first to admit, I had no prior experience with her or her output. And after this film, I still have no experience. The movie was terrible, but also exactly what I thought it would be.

I want to call the film shamefully capitalist. We follow a main character who works her way up to becoming the 47^th richest woman in the United States, which seems an oddly specific number, and makes a wonderfully subtle public appearance alongside the wonderfully subtle song and dance number by T-Pain and tells her legions of fans to follow the “American Dream” and work hard. Knowing the way the United States actually works and the people there that actually made it big, that seems a little bit inaccurate. After she is convicted of insider trading within her company and is rewarded with about five minutes and one unfunny gag work of jail time, she seeks to work her way back up again. She does this through encouraging Girl Guides to forcibly sell as many brownies as they can to unsuspecting families to turn in a profit, which she then distributes back to them in the form of physical wads of cash. This is suspicious to me, and I would follow it up more if I knew any more about how the economy works in general.

Between this film and Pixels (it hurts to put that in italics), this is building a case with regards to Peter Dinklage’s recent film career. When he’s not on his small budget hole-in-the-wall TV series, he’s played exclusively for laughs in these terrible comedies as a dwarf who has preferences for other cultures and accents. Here, it’s Japanese culture he’s into, which is thankfully left at samurai swords and top-knots only. If it went any further than that, I would definitely have reconnected with the latter part of my fight or flight senses while sitting in the theatre. Is this movie just racist to little people? Is this movie racist to Peter Dinklage? Can we help Peter Dinklage overcome this typecasting? Can we help him find more racist roles? This particular part is just nonsensical, and feels like an outtake from Bruno, with the exception of his romantic (???) history with the film’s lead.