That’s Quite Enough, Melissa McCarthy

Disclaimer: I like Melissa McCarthy. She may not have fulfilled the potential set-out by her amazing performance in Bridesmaids,  but I like her. The Heat is really good and she’s really good in it and was the best part of This Is 40 and made me laugh, like, once, in Identity Thief which I still haven’t forgiven her for. So I like her. I do, but… this new trailer for Tammy, the movie she and her husband wrote (and he, Ben Falcone, directed) isn’t encouraging.

Before Bridesmaids (which, let me make clear, she is brilliant in and deserved that Oscar nomination) Melissa McCarthy did a lot of small, quirky parts. To a lot of you, she is best known for her role on Gilmore Girls. To the other 5 people, myself included, you remember her time on Samantha Who? (take a moment to bow you heads and remember Samantha Who?). On either show she played to aspects of her comedy we’ve come to enjoy (or be annoyed by) but it was way more subtle. I assume she plays the same type of “normal” on Mike & Molly but I won’t watch that until it becomes The Melissa McCarthy Show it should have been from the beginning (or, just, Molly).

I’m not disqualifying her talent, there are others on the internet who would love to do so. It’s that Tammy does not show me anything else, anything new, it’s just another variation of one of her sketch characters we’ve seen when she hosts Saturday Night Live (which, by the way, her most recent hosting job was subpar). But it clicks. The general audiences LOVE this shit. This is why Identity Thief did so, so well. The Heat too but that is a good movie. Maybe I’m jaded because I assumed Tammy wouldn’t be this kind of movie, I thought, with her writing, it would be a bit more grounded. Granted, I’m judging from a 2 minute teaser trailer that is just from one scene (and it did make me laugh) but still, it seems it follows her Psychopath With A Heart of Gold-shtick. She’s more than this. I support her, I love that she is a hugely successful movie star, but if we’re going to shit on, who, Johnny Depp for playing the same character all the time, then she deserves some shit too.