Tammy review

Tammy (15/R, 97 mins)
Director: Ben Falcone
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Since making a big impression (and landing an Oscar nomination) with Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy has firmly established herself as a leading comic talent.

Here with Tammy she gets a screenplay credit for the first time, co-writing with her husband Ben Falcone, who also makes his feature directing debut. Unfortunately they’ve come unstuck and aren’t able to deliver anything like the necessary hit rate of laughs required for a mainstream summer comedy.

The title character of Tammy sees McCarthy play a chaotic and dishevelled woman whom we first meet as she hits a deer with her car. It’s just the first of many scenes that make vain grasps for laughs that come from her shtick of going off on a semi-improvised rant that quickly descends into ill-disciplined mugging, leaving vast expanses of empty air where laughter goes to die.

McCarthy is a very talented comic actor, but she’s in danger of selling herself short if she continues in these kinds of roles. Her loudmouth and slobby routine has been the go-to since the unfunny Identity Thief, although it served her well in The Heat last year, helped by the balance with Sandra Bullock.

Tammy ends up getting fired from her job at a burger joint as an indirect result of the deer incident, although by the looks of it that dismissal had been coming for a while. She also discovers her husband is having an affair with a neighbour and so decides to leave town.

But with no car to make good her escape, she tries to borrow one from her mother (Allison Janney), who is well aware of her slippery nature. As it turns out, Tammy’s ailing grandmother, Pearl (Susan Sarandon, presumably supposed to be playing 80), also wants to get out of her mother’s house and Tammy needs a car, and so the pair of them set off together on what should be the start of an uproarious road trip, but which doesn’t seem to have any destination or purpose in mind.

It’s just an aimless journey, taking in scrapes and shenanigans along the way, all of it flat and meandering, thanks to deeply unappealing characters and pratfalls that really don’t work and. Along the way, Pearl tries to persuade Tammy to try to change her ways, to find some direction in her life, but this is abruptly abandoned in favour of Pearl getting into drunken mishaps.

It’s only when Tammy meets Bobby (Mark Duplass) and his father, who takes a shine to Pearl, that she sees what a decent person is like. But even with that, character shifts seem sudden and unearned.

And though McCarthy and Sarandon do their best with their poorly conceived roles, they're barely able to raise a smile between them. A ridiculously starry cast fills out the rest of the film, though many of them are in very small roles; quite why Toni Collette and Dan Aykroyd show up for one scene apiece is a mystery.

That would simply be a side note if the film were only funnier. But the sad truth is that Tammy is so low on viable jokes that you begin to wonder if it maybe isn’t supposed to be a comedy at all.

Due Date review

Due Date (15, 95 mins)
Director: Todd Phillips
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Due Date is very much being pitched as a companion piece to The Hangover, sharing as it does its director and one of its stars, Zach Galifianakis. What it’s really a companion piece to is John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with a basic setup (man has only a few days to get across the country with someone he despises) and character dynamic (one is straightfaced, the other a boorish nincompoop) that could not be more borrowed from PTA if it were an official remake.

Robert Downey Jr. is Peter, a fretful father to be, trying to get home from a business trip on the other side of the country in time for the birth of his first child in a few days time. Thanks to an incident on the plane caused by the idiotic Ethan (Galifianakis, more or less reprising his Hangover character), both men get chucked off the plane and banned from catching any other flight.

Peter’s wallet is on the flight with the rest of his baggage so his only hope of getting from Atlanta to LA is by sharing a car with Ethan. Cue the cross-country road trip between two thoroughly mismatched souls, and plenty of trouble in the shape of Ethan’s ‘medicinal’ marijuana, lack of sleep, car crashes and run-ins with the law.

Downey plays it more or less straight, not going for glib as he has in his recent action comedy roles, with his exasperation at being driven to distraction by the morons he meets along the way allowing for a very welcome dark edge.

At least with John Candy in PTA, you always knew his heart was in the right place. Here Ethan begins as dumb and inappropriate before it soon becomes clear that he’s an irredeemable sociopath. Mind you, to its eternal credit, the film never quite asks us to accept him as anything else, also managing to avoid the mawkish conciliation so often foisted upon audiences.

It’s at its strongest in a first half that stays quite small, with a few antics on their pit-stops that offer a fair amount of fun. But as it progresses and the need for the set pieces to become more elaborate increases, it loses much of that good will. It doesn’t really offer any tension with the timescale and the introduction of one or two other characters are pointless red herrings.

But it’s all about making you laugh and succeeds on that basis at regular intervals. In terms of laughs generated, it’s not quite on a par with The Hangover when it comes to either quality or quantity, but it’ll do just fine until the real sequel arrives in the summer.