She feels pretty but Is she funny?

Amy Schumer's latest misses the mark.

Amy Schumer's I Feel Pretty springs from a potentially fertile comic premise. A young woman who thinks that she’s hopelessly unattractive hits her head and suddenly believes that she has become beautiful.

Filled with newfound confidence, this woman -- Schumer’s Renee -- begins behaving as she always imagined a beautiful woman would. In Schumer's hands, Renee’s behavior as a newly anointed beauty brims with comic exaggeration and border-line obnoxiousness.

Still, Renee begins to take control of her life. She aggressively flirts with a man at the dry cleaners. She goes after a less obscure job in the cosmetics company that employees her. She's having the time of her life.

So is Renee a little crazy? Not exactly. When she looks in the mirror, she sees herself as gorgeous. Everyone else, of course, sees the same old Renee.

In case you haven't already guessed, the moral is that women should be happy to be themselves. More, they should be proud to be themselves.

And in case you missed the message -- obvious from the start -- the movie provides Renee with an end-of-picture speech in which she hits it directly on the nose.

To reach its foregone conclusion, the story follows the blossoming Renee as she becomes the highly-visible receptionist for her company. Predictably, Renee also offers the company CEO (Michelle Williams) advice about how to market a new “diffusion” line of products, which is supposed to help the company reach shoppers in the economy’s less affluent realms.

For me, Williams provides I Feel Pretty’s only real surprise: She's funny as an executive who can't reconcile her girlish voice with her corporate status.

The movie's formula requires that Renee also find love; it arrives in the form of an ordinary guy played by Rory Scovel. Scovel’s character acts as if he’s impressed by Renee’s unabashed boldness, displayed when she enters a bikini contest at Coney Island, adapting her street clothes for the occasion.

Renee also has gal pals (Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant), women she treats badly once she believes that she’s acquired the looks of a model.

Not only does I Feel Pretty score low on credibility, but the writing/directing team of Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein lobs a softball; I Feel Pretty has little or no bite when it comes to criticizing the cosmetics industry, media-generated standards of beauty or much else for that matter.

Veterans marred by combat

A straightforward look at the difficulties of returning home from war.

The problems depicted in Thank You For Your Service should be familiar to anyone who has followed news coverage about the plight of veterans returning from Iraq: high suicide rates, an over-taxed VA, crippling cases of PTSD, limited job prospects and other issues related to re-entering civilian life. I've read that the percentage of soldiers who incur psychological damage after deployment in contemporary war zones ranges from 20 to 30 percent.

Familiarity aside, director Jason Hall (who wrote the screenplay for American Sniper) dramatizes the problems facing veterans in mostly effective ways, focusing on three soldiers returning from Iraq in 2008 (Miles Teller, Beulah Koale and Joe Cole).

The actors are playing lower-middle-class guys whose lives have been radically altered by the intensity of their war-time experiences. Tiller's Adam has difficulty re-connecting with his wife (Haley Bennett) and two kids. Cole's Joe arrives home to discover that his fiancee has abandoned him, leaving him in a state of disconsolate confusion. Kaole's Tausolo Aieti -- a.k.a. "Solo" -- suffers from memory loss and sudden eruptions of violence that ultimately affect his relationship with his wife (Keisha Castle-Hughes).

Emotionally disturbed and mentally addled, Solo becomes involved with an older veteran (Omar J. Dorsey), a drug dealer whose efforts to exploit Solo pull the movie off track, but who also adds another generation of disaffection to the story.

Although these men are combat-tested, they're not too proud to ask for help from a VA that is often too burdened to provide it. The movie, which pretty much skirts political issues, doesn't rail against the VA: The folks who work for the VA are simply overwhelmed by numbers.

A combat incident that saddles Teller's character with guilt weaves through the movie; it's seen in flashback toward the end when Adam meets with the widow (Amy Schumer) of a soldier whose death has become a principal source of Adam's guilt. Equally moving is a scene in which Adam travels from Kansas to Arkansas to meet with Emory (Scott Haze), a debilitated soldier for whom Adam also feels responsible.

Playing a take-charge sergeant, Teller gives the movie's main performance, but he strips his work of any trace of show-boating, something that's true for the entire cast.

Based on a 2013 book by David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service stands as an illustrative example of the kind of fighting that begins once soldiers return home from war: Too often, the battle they wind up waging is with themselves.

Schumer and Hawn stumble in the jungle

Formula tramples fun in this early summer comedy.

It has been 15 years since Goldie Hawn appeared in a movie. Maybe she should have waited a bit longer instead of hitching her star to Snatched, a comedy that teams her with Amy Schumer. Hawn, who has made her share of successful comedies, this time appears in a formula job that elevates raunch in the service of yuks that are few and far between -- at least for me.

Widely regarded as one of the funnier comics on the planet, Schumer received lots of praise for Trainwreck, a 2015 comedy that she wrote and which Judd Apatow directed. But Schumer didn't write Snatched. That job fell to Katie Dippold, whose credits include the recent Ghostbusters movie (not good) and The Heat (better).

Here, Dippold, with a forgettable assist from director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before and Warm Bodies), provides a platform to showcase Schumer's willingness to go raunchy in ways that become a form of feminist assertion -- and, at least in the past, have hit paydirt.

Schumer plays Emily, a young woman who loses both her job and her boyfriend in the movie's opening scenes. To make matters worse, Emily is stuck with two tickets to Ecuador, a country she planned to visit with the boyfriend who decided he could do better.

Unable to persuade any friend to accompany her to Ecuador, Emily coerces her reluctant mother (Hawn) into joining her for an adventure. Emily also has a brother (Ike Barinholtz), an emotionally hampered adult who still lives with his mother and who's unable to leave the house. Why? Because he's the comedy's demonstrably (and annoyingly) neurotic character -- as opposed to Emily, a character defined by her self-absorption.

Once in Ecuador, Emily is lured into a trap that results in mother and daughter being kidnapped. During the course of their prolonged escape, Emily manages to put a spear through someone's throat for what she insists should be seen as an "accidental murder." She also must rid herself of a colossally sized tape worm that's extracted from her mouth by a couple of locals who lure the bug from her by dangling a hunk of meat in front of Emily's face, perhaps the movie's biggest laugh.

Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack appear in roles that could have added welcome strangeness had they been around more. Their rough-and-ready characters eventually try to rescue Emily and her Mom.

Fairness compels me to tell you that a preview audience reacted more favorably to the movie than I did, but for me, the movie's few random chuckles were matched by a significantly larger number of scowls as I watched two talented women sweat their way through the Amazon.

Amy Schumer's semi-nasty rom-com

In Trainwreck, the spotlight is on a sexually aggressive woman.

Is there anything Tilda Swinton can't do?

In the new Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck, a nearly unrecognizable Swinton plays the crisply aggressive British editor of S'nuff, a trendy New York-based magazine that explores such ludicrous topics as the best ways for men to masturbate at work.

"Pitch me. Pitch Me,'' she goads her staff, looking for topics to satisfy her perverse journalistic appetites.

Swinton's role is parodic, but it leaves you wondering whether she might have added even more sharpness to a movie such as The Devil Wears Prada.

But wait. I already hear the groaning. Why am I talking about an actress who has a tasty supporting role in a comedy starring Schumer, the off-color, feminist-oriented comic who's garnering big-time attention at the moment.

The best answer, I suppose, is that I'm easing into what's going to be a review that resists falling too far on either side of the Schumer fence.

In Trainwreck, Schumer earns a center-stage spot on the big screen, but her movie hits flat spots even as it finds major comic flourishes. Besides, Trainwreck isn't nearly as creative as Schumer's Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer.

In Trainwreck, Schumer plays Amy Townsend, a talented magazine writer who defends herself against emotional involvement by sleeping with just about every man who crosses her path.

Amy has rules about her profligacy. She never spends the night with one of her bedmates. She consumes lovers, and quickly moves on.

That's an interesting (and novel) enough premise for a comedy, and it probably should have carried Trainwreck further than it does.

After all, movies seldom portray women as aggressors in the sexual arena. Amy doesn't make love: She notches conquests.

This approach allows Schumer, who wrote the screenplay, to play to her strengths. In the war-of-the-sexes, her character takes no prisoners.

The movie, which was directed by Judd Apatow, has fun putting Amy in charge of its sometimes scalding narrative.

The most notable of Schumer's early picture assaults revolves around Amy's relationship with a muscle-bound hunk (John Cena) who's too dim to acknowledge his homoerotic impulses. He also can't believe that Amy's interest in him doesn't extend beyond the sack, where his idea of erotic talk has to do with filling her with protein. He makes love to her as if she were an exercise machine.

Amy's life, which also includes excessive alcohol consumption, makes room for encounters with her sister Kim (Brie Larson), a younger woman who's married and who has a stepson, a brainy child who rubs Amy the wrong way. Kim qualifies as the anti-Amy, but the sisters are close.

If there's any psychology here, it revolves around Amy's father (Colin Quinn): He's a bigoted Mets fan who left his wife because he couldn't stand the bondage of monogamy.

A demonstrably rotten father and a worse husband, Quinn's Gordon presumably served as Amy's role model when it comes to men. His philandering evidently paved the way for Amy's lack of trust.

Still, Dad's the person to whom Amy feels closest. When illness forces him to move into an assisted living facility, Amy dotes on him.

So where's all this going? The train wreck that passes for Amy's life eventually takes a predictable turn. In the course of researching a story, she meets a well-regarded sports doctor (Bill Hader).

A bit awkward around women, Hader's character falls for Amy. She falls for him, too, but to make the relationship work, Amy must lower her guard and overcome her indifference to all matters concerning sports.

The movie's love story accomplishes two things: It allows Trainwreck to spend too much of its indulgent 125-minute length chugging into conventional rom-com territory (girl meets boy, girl screws up relationship, girl learns lesson), and it introduces cameos from two basketball players LeBron James (funny) and Amar'e Stoudemire (not so much).

The movie, by the way, is set in New York during a time when Stoudemire was still a Knick. Last I checked, he plays for the Miami Heat.

Much of the humor revolves around sex and reflects Schumer's non-stop attack on feminine cliches and the male ego. And, yes, her humor can be laced with acid.

For the most part, Hader's playing straight man as the movie's romantic lead, a good guy whose patience qualifies as preternatural.

Here's the pivotal point, though. You may find yourself wondering why Hader's Aaron doesn't give up on a woman who seems intent on destroying relationships. Amy can be amusing, but she's not always likable. She's often a pain in the butt.

Apatow (This Is 40, Funny People, Knocked up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) doesn't always strike the right balance between the movie's comedy and its occasional serious moments, but directorial style doesn't much matter here. This is Schumer's showcase.

A footnote: It's refreshing to see James poke fun at the grim-faced intensity he shows on the basketball court. Those of us who follow the NBA seldom see LeBron James exercise his smile the way he does here.

Maybe in her next film, Schumer and James can go one-on-one. The result might make for good, competitive fun.