Life of the Party

The great Melissa McCarthy suffers the Ben Falcone curse yet again in Life of the Party, a shitty Back to School rip-off, which makes it double shitty because Back to School sucked. Falcone is McCarthy’s husband, and he has now directed her in three movies, all bad. The duo worked together on Tammy, one of McCarthy’s worst films, and The Boss, the best of their work together but still pretty bad. McCarthy plays Deanna, a frumpy, middle-aged mom with a daughter, Maddie (Molly Gordon), going into her last year in college. Within minutes of dropping their daughter off at school, her husband (Matt Walsh) dumps her for a real estate agent played by the actress from Modern Family (Julie Bowen). A dejected Deanna decides to enroll in school—a shockingly easy process in this film—and finds herself not only attending college alongside her daughter but hanging out with her and her sorority sisters. She’s considered a square at first, but a quick makeover during a party in the bathroom has her emerge as the coolest new girl on campus with awesome hair. What follows are a bunch of predictable gags involving college life and McCarthy struggling to make material well beneath her talents go somewhere. There are hardly any laughs, but plenty of groans.