While there's plenty about The Boss to appreciate, I'm just not certain there's a great deal to like.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 11, 2016

There's something irrepressible about McCarthy's shtick. Her foul-mouthed rants are always amusing, even when they're not quite laugh-out-loud funny.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2016

The Boss is sketch comedy, with none of the lines colored in.

| Jul 22, 2016

The confidently modest McCarthy creates her own happy endings. Make a date with this woman and you'll TF it's Friday.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2016

Racks up enough laughs to justify the ticket price.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2016

Look, I love Melissa McCarthy -- she is a truly gifted comic actress -- and I want to love her films. So she should stop making bad ones! It's bumming me out!

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 10, 2016

It is probably too much to expect a mainstream comedy to sustain the level of malice, greed, misanthropy, and cynicism that propels The Boss early on. Without these elements, though, the film drifts off into dreary conventionality.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 9, 2016

It's quite funny, though not exactly original, and as with Amy Schumer, you can see how McCarthy gets de-fanged by the imperatives of mainstream Hollywood comedy, with its need for sentimental resolutions.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 9, 2016

McCarthy is stranded, salvaging only what she can through the stray excellence of her timing, which is more or less infallible.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 9, 2016

In the film's floundering search for a decent laugh, the wackiness is upped to desperate levels in the hope that something - anything - might stick.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 6, 2016

Fitfully funny but failing to really build to much of anything, The Boss is mostly a bust. Even its main character would have a hard time buying it.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 5, 2016

Dinklage is awful as the foppish villain, and aside from one uproarious, ad-libbed riff, McCarthy seems to be on autopilot.

| Apr 21, 2016

The Boss is not as clever or as funny as it might have been, but seeing it made me think about a few issues within the film and outside of it, which is not a bad result.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 15, 2016

McCarthy and her director and co-writer Ben Falcone -- who previously collaborated with her on the underrated Tammy -- struggle to sustain the energy of this opening.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 14, 2016

The script was co-written by McCarthy herself in collaboration with Steve Mallory, a pal from her Groundlings days, and her husband, actor-writer Ben Falcone, who directed the film, but it fails to give her anything like the nourishment she needs.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 14, 2016

An opportunity to watch a comedic performer at the top of her game revel boldly in her own confident weirdness.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 13, 2016

It doesn't have a story beyond, "What if Melissa McCarthy played the boss?" That it almost succeeds is a testament to her strengths as a performer and the rest of the game ensemble cast.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 11, 2016

The movie is all too neat a package for McCarthy's exuberantly inventive comic artistry.

| Apr 11, 2016

Even though The Boss is co-written by McCarthy and her husband, director Ben Falcone (who should know his wife's strengths better), the film often strands its title character in shrill one-note caricature, mostly unchallenged.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 10, 2016

McCarthy is funniest when she's hardcore; her worst movies, this and 'Tammy' and 'Identity Thief,' force her to go all soft.

| Apr 9, 2016