Thunder Force (2021)

Thunder Force arrives in 2021 with a premise assembled from spare parts: cosmic rays grant superpowers to sociopaths, so a geneticist and her estranged childhood friend inject themselves with serums and fight crime in Chicago. Ben Falcone writes and directs, and the film represents his fifth collaboration with Melissa McCarthy, a partnership that has produced a reliable quantity of product if not a reliable quantity of laughs. The critical reception was unkind. Fifty-two million households watched it anyway, which tells us something about the appetite for superhero comedy in the streaming era and rather less about the appetite for this one.

The picture's most substantive cultural gesture is its casting. Two women lead, one of them Black, and the supporting ensemble is populated with performers of color without the film ever stopping to congratulate itself for the arrangement. A mother-daughter thread runs through the third act, and the central friendship between the two leads carries a mild current of female solidarity. That current never becomes a thesis. The film is too busy with crab-armed villains and bus-throwing gags to mount an argument about anything. A viewer hoping for a critique of patriarchy will find two women punching a mayoral candidate and little else.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly empty. No LGBTQ characters appear. Race is present as casting and absent as subject. The villain is a power-hungry office seeker, not an industrialist, so there is no economic grievance to air. Climate, body image, neurodivergence, and historical reinterpretation are all untouched. What remains is a comedy that occasionally gestures toward empowerment and then returns to the business of jokes. The jokes, unfortunately, are the weakest part.