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.

'Veronica Mars' stalks the big screen

A TV series becomes a movie. The result is middling.

Whether you embrace Veronica Mars, the big-screen adaptation of a popular TV series that ended in 2007, may depend on whether you were a fan of the show to begin with.

At a preview screening, a knowing audience laughed appreciatively when familiar characters made their entrances. I think that's because they knew what these characters were about and didn't need much by way of back-and-fill explanation.

The film, by the way, begins with a short reprise of what happened on the TV series, persumably to allow for a bit of audience expansion.

If you're not a fan of the series, you may find the movie to be flat and unexceptional. If I knew nothing about Veronica Mars, the $5.7 million Kickstarter campaign that brought it into existence, and the obvious devotion of its fans, I would have had trouble understanding why this movie was even made.

Look, a 108-minute feature is not a TV series, and that may be the trouble. A TV series puts the emphasis on characters we get know over time. We live with these characters over entire seasons.

A movie, on the other hand, is a self-contained entity that needs a strong story. Veronica Mars doesn't really have one.

For those who need a quick primer, it's worth pointing out that Veronica (Kristen Bell) started out as a teen sleuth who worked with her private investigator father (Enrico Colantoni) to solve crimes and to penetrate the veil of corruption that surrounds law enforcement in Neptune, Ca., Veronica's fictional hometown.

Throughout three seasons of TV, Veronica displayed a keen gift for mockery and contempt that made her both a participant and a commentator on the show's developments. She could pretty much burst anyone's bubble.

In the movie version, time has marched on, and Veronica just has graduated from law school. She's interviewing with a prestigious New York City firm when she's summoned back to Neptune.

There, she's drawn into the investigation of the murder of a rock star, a young woman with whom Veronica attended high school. Veronica's former boyfriend Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) -- now a Naval officer -- has been accused of the murder.

In traveling to Neptune, Veronica leaves her current boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell) behind. Early on, you get the feeling that the Veronica/Piz romance is doomed. Veronica isn't one to be tied down.

At one point, the mystery takes Veronica into Hollywood, where she encounters James Franco, who's playing himself in a cameo that has an unfortunate in-joke quality.

Rob Thomas, who created the TV series, does a good job of keeping some of the high school dynamics alive, working a 10th anniversary class reunion into the proceedings.

And there's no faulting Bell, who maintains the smart, wise-cracking abilities that made Veronica so distinctive.

Usually when I see a movie, I have some idea about its box-office prospects. I have none with Veronica Mars, which will be made available on VOD at the same time as its theatrical release. The movie's success probably depends on how big a fan base it actually has.

I hope those fans find what they're looking for. As for the rest of you? I can't give you many compelling reasons for adding Veronica Mars to your moviegoing vocabulary -- unless it's to catch up on another pop-cultural phenomenon.