Timothy Simons

Melissa McCarthy brings another of her improvisational alter-egos to the big screen with this energetic comedy. The first cause for pause comes because this is a reteaming with her filmmaker husband Ben Falcone, with whom she made the bizarrely unfunny Tammy, as opposed to the filmmaker Paul Feig who directed her to box office triumph with Spy and The Heat and an Oscar nomination in Bridesmaids. Yes, there's a significance difference.

This time she plays hugely popular financial guru Michelle Darnell, whose stardom ends abruptly when she is sent to prison for four months for insider trading. When she's released, everyone she stepped on as she rose to the top turns their back on her, and her nemesis/ex Renault (Peter Dinklage) is still determined to get revenge. The only person who will talk to her is former assistant Claire (Kristen Bell), so Michelle moves in with her family. Unable to restart her business, she also takes over the Dandelion Scout troup of Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson), pushing the girls to take aggressive measures to sell their cookies.

As always, McCarthy throws herself into the role, creating a vivid character who indulges in a lot of outrageously silly slapstick. As with Tammy, the humour centres more on abusive interaction and humiliation than actual wit. McCarthy and Falcone strain to get laughs from physical wackiness rather than anything based on the character, so the movie only ever feels mildly amusing thanks to its high energy. But there's nothing engaging about Michelle, and it's only in a few cute-warm scenes with the terrific Bell that the film springs to anything resembling life. Thankfully, her scenes with the likeable Tyler Labine (as a potential boyfriend) have a loose humour to them. And Dinklage is surprisingly amusing as the sputtering cartoonish villain, while Kathy Bates generates a few sparks as Michelle's sassy mentor.

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Mixing the action, comedy and horror from novelist R.L. Stein's books into a family-friendly package, this lively romp is entertaining enough to amuse the audience even when it veers off the rails. It helps that Jack Black is on board, giving one of his more energetically charged performances, and that the script peppers scenes with smart gags. But an over-reliance on big special effects weakens the movie's big climax, and the breathless pace is sometimes exhausting.

Black plays Stein himself, a reclusive author and over-protective father who lives in a small town with his daughter Hannah (Odeya Rush). Then single mother Gale (Amy Ryan) moves in next door with her teen son Zach (Dylan Minette), who is immediately intrigued by Hannah. Despite Stein's warnings, Zach and his new school friend Champ (Ryan Lee) sneak into the house to find out more, opening one of the novelist's manuscripts in the process. Out pops an abominable snowman, who proceeds to wreak havoc in the town. And the next literary escapee, the sadistic ventriloquist's dummy Slappy, is even worse. He sets about releasing all of Stein's fictional monsters into the real world, unleashing chaos on a massive scale. But Zach has an idea that may stop the mayhem.

Screenwriter Darren Lemke and director Rob Letterman have a great time bringing the maximum level of pandemonium to this small town, with a range of outrageous creatures that are both comical and scary. These are rendered in rather obvious digital animation, including a gang of militarised garden gnomes, a slimy blob, zombies, werewolves and a gigantic praying mantis. But the cartoonish sheen is undercut intriguingly by some genuinely tense moments, mainly because Slappy is properly menacing. Black provides Slappy's gleefully sinister voice while hamming it up on-screen as Stein. Minette and Rush are fine as the usual bland youthful heroes with a cute hint of romance between them. And more textured acting is provided in small roles by Ryan, Jillian Bell (as Gale's airhead sister) and Ken Marino (as a lovelorn colleague).

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There's half of a great satire here, as Seth Rogen, James Franco and Evan Goldberg combine that freewheeling mayhem from This Is the End with some more pointed political comedy. But in its second half, the script begins to repeat its less-funny jokes, wallowing in smutty gags and excessive violence. These things may please the chuckleheads in the audience, but they wear everyone else out. And they make us work to see the film's much more enjoyable brom-com plot and sharp social commentary.

The story is centred around swaggering TV personality Dave Skylark (Franco), whose chat show majors in shocking celebrity revelations like Eminem's homosexuality or Rob Lowe's baldness. Dave's producer Aaron (Rogen) is feeling like a second-class newsmaker when he discovers that North Korean despot Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) is a fan of Dave's show and is willing to be interviewed live on camera. Then before they can head off, two CIA operatives (Lizzy Caplan and Reese Alexander) convince Dave and Aaron to assassinate Kim with a deadly drug. And when they arrive in Pongyang their mission is complicated when Aaron falls for Kim's media director Sook (Diana Bang) and Dave falls for Kim himself.

Yes, the film has a fairly standard romantic-comedy structure, as Dave and Aaron's close friendship is strained to the breaking point by the arrival of another man. Virtually all of the dialogue is infused with gay innuendo, double entendres and full-on sex jokes. Some of this is genuinely hilarious, such as the first time Dave and Kim discover their mutual love of Katy Perry's Firework. Then that joke is brought back four or five times, so by the end it's not even mildly amusing. Pretty much every gag in the film is beaten to death, even the ones that weren't funny to begin with. Thankfully, the actors' energy never flags.

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