Melissa McCarthy parties on -- and on

A mother joins her daughter as a college student in Life of the Party.

It’s entirely possible that a woman who gave up her career ambitions when she committed to marriage and raising a daughter might return to college to complete her senior year, particularly after being dumped by her husband of 23 years. It’s also possible that enough time would have passed that the woman's daughter could have arrived at her senior year in college, as well. It's even possible that mother and daughter would find themselves enrolled at the same university.

Considering all this, it’s not too much of a stretch to view Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy, Life of the Party, as a plausible effort to show what might happen if such a mother/daughter situation developed in the hallowed halls of fictional Decatur University.

But that’s where credibility ends and comedy (or what passes for it) begins in Life of the Party, a movie that provides an answer to a question you probably haven’t spent much time considering -- at least I hope not. What could be less appealing than an R-rated McCarthy comedy directed by her real-life husband Ben Falcone (Tammy and The Boss)? Yep, it’s a PG-13 rated comedy from the same team.

The mostly wan Life of the Party follows McCarthy’s Deanna into the dorms of Decatur and turns her into an archeology student who doesn’t dig up enough laughs to earn Life of the Party a passing grade.

At first, Deanna’s daughter’s (Molly Gordon) expresses embarrassment at having her mom around campus. But without much by way of transition, mother and daughter find a new bond as gal pals.

Daughter helps Mom with a fashion makeover that takes her from prim and proper to a woman who appeals to a college kid (Luke Benward) with whom she has hot sex. As Deanna puts it, she rocks his world.

Of the supporting cast, Maya Rudolph, as Deanna's best friend, gives a ribald edge of an otherwise staid suburban woman. Matt Walsh is wasted as Deanna’s ex, a man who has taken up with a realtor (Julie Brown) who bosses him around and immediately sells the home in which he and Deanna lived. The house was in his name.

Deanna has a sullen, self-isolating roommate (Heidi Gardner), but the sisters in her daughter's sorority are a fairly generic group for whom Deanna morphs from a fish-out-of-water woman into an inspirational figure.

Supposed high points protrude self-consciously from the mix. These include a scene in which Deanna and her college cohorts trash her ex-husband’s wedding, a scene at an 80s themed party at which Deanna dominates the dance floor, and a restaurant scene which Deanna confronts her former husband.

The restaurant scene lands some laughs, perhaps because it contains one of the movie's few surprises.

The only moment I found slightly amusing was a bit of physical comedy in which Deanna fumbles her way through an oral archaeology mid-term, engaging in battle with a recalcitrant lectern. Maybe I’m clutching at straws but the bit reminded me of Jerry Lewis. A little?

Otherwise, Life of the Party suggests that the filmmakers might do well to return to comedy school for a refresher in how to avoid the kind of formula traps that tend to neuter comic potential.

Melissa McCarthy, crude again

The Boss breaks no new ground for its star.

In The Boss, Melissa McCarthy portrays a tycoon who has been ranked the 47th richest woman in the world, a self-absorbed striver who loses everything after an insider-trading scandal and then stages a comeback.

Too bad McCarthy's foul-mouthed Michelle Darnell doesn't make her way into the top 47 funniest characters in movies. She's not even close.

Teaming with her husband, director Ben Falcone, who directed her in the equally lame Tammy, McCarthy tries to spice up a one dimensional comedy with intermittent helpings of slapstick and even heavier doses of crude humor.

McCarthy reportedly created the movie's main character when she was a member of The Groundlings, a Los Angeles comedy troupe. Let's just say that McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Falcone and Steve Mallory, hasn't come up with the most imaginative ways to put this character into a 99-minute movie.

After a stint at a federal prison, a newly impoverished Michelle takes up residence with a former assistant named Claire (Kristen Bell) and Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson).

After accompanying Anderson's Rachel to a meeting of a Girl Scout-like organization called The Dandelions, Michelle devises a money-making scheme. She'll form her own group ("Darnell's Darlings") and sell brownies for profit. Her kiddie sales force will receive 10 percent commissions.

Meanwhile, Michelle's nemesis, another tycoon played by Peter Dinklage plots to reduce her burgeoning brownie empire to rubble.

Among the movie's bad ideas -- and there are many -- two standout. One involves a no-holds-barred fist fight between the Dandelions and Darnell's Darlings. The other centers on a climactic sword fight (no, I'm not kidding) between Dinklage's Renault and Michelle.

Somewhere along the line Kathy Bates turns up as Ida, a woman who helped Michelle on her meteoric rise and who agrees to lend financial support to her new enterprise.

If you step back from this McCarthy dominated mess, you may realize that she had an opportunity to use this character as a Trump-like launch pad for one hell of a satire.

Instead, the movie's principal strategy (streaming profanity in inappropriate places) feels so familiar, it's a non-starter.

McCarthy boasts a new short, red hairdo, but little else about her work in The Boss feels fresh. Michelle may be more upscale than some of McCarthy's previous characters, but McCarthy's doing another variation on the same-old joke. At this rate, she's likely to turn herself into a one-woman formula.

Melissa McCarthy's summer stumble

Tammy's as crude as you'd expect, but not as funny as you might have hoped.

Few things are more painful than being stuck in a moving vehicle with people who you find annoying. That's exactly how I felt watching Tammy, a movie that puts Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon on the road.

Painfully misguided, Tammy is the result of a collaboration between McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with McCarthy and who also handled the directing chores.

Tammy finds McCarthy playing the title character, the wayward granddaughter of an aging alcoholic (Sarandon).

After being fired from her job at a fast-food franchise, McCarthy's Tammy sets out on a road trip with her grandmother, who supplies the car -- an aging Cadillac -- and the money that supports a journey toward Niagara Falls, a stop on grandma's bucket list.

All of this takes place over the objections of Tammy's mother (Allison Janney), who understands that grandma is both a diabetic and a drunk, and shouldn't be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Sarandon may be game for anything, but she's given scenes that struck me as embarrassing: carrying on in the backseat of a car with a guy (Cary Cole) she meets in a bar or having a drunken outburst at a Fourth of July party thrown by her lesbian cousin (Kathy Bates).

McCarthy's luckier: Her previous comic roles have immunized her against embarrassment. Here, she plays a foul-mouthed woman whose husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair with a neighbor (Toni Collette).

As is the case with many crude comedies, Tammy feels the need to sentimentalize its main character before it's done, something like an boisterous drunk who ends the evening crying in his beer.

Tammy 's told -- via lame dialogue Bates delivers with unnecessary conviction -- that she needs to take control of her life and stop wallowing in self-pity.

She's supposed to do this even though her drunken aunt has grabbed a microphone and told the partying lesbians that Tammy's a fat loser worthy of the nickname "cheeseburger."

Sarandon has been made to look as old as possible, even to the point of donning artificially swollen ankles, but she's never convincingly dissolute.

In what may have been intended as a comic high point, Tammy puts a paper bag on her head and robs a fast-food outlet after fashioning another paper bag into a pretend revolver. She needs money to bail grandma out of jail.

If this was intended as the movie's comic high point, it's not much of one.

Mark Duplass plays the son of the man who picked up grandma in a bar and a potential love interest for Tammy, the movie's lone representative of normalcy.

Tammy tries to get by making lame jokes about old folks, dishing out crude humor and toying with the image McCarthy has created in previous comedies such as Identity Thief, The Heat and, of course, in Bridesmaids, the movie that provided her with a breakthrough role.

Maybe because it's summer, Tammy even finds an excuse to blow up grandma's car. If only that had happened before grandma and Tammy had had a chance to get into it.