You have to give Melissa McCarthy huge props for giving it her all in TAMMY. There is NO better physical female comedian working today and when Tammy is going for comedy, it scores.
Unfortunately, the film Tammy can't quite figure out what it wants to be, slipping into and out of drama and romantic comedy mode and back into comedy in a massive bi-polar mess.
McCarthy kicks off the film by hitting a deer with her crappy car, getting fired from her job at the burger joint for being late and going home early to find her husband serving dinner to the neighbor.
So Tammy tells her Mom (Allison Janney, hugely talented and underused) that she is taking off and her grandmother joins her, funding her road trip and escape from her troubles.
The fact that her grandmother Pearl is played by Susan Sarandon is one of the best and worst things about the movie, as Sarandon can be very funny, but she never seems old enough to truly be grandma. It would have been a much funnier movie if the foul mouthed and appropriately aged June Squibb from "Nebraska" would have played the role.
The road trip is full of misadventures of both the comic and the serious variety. Mark Duplass is great as a man Tammy meets on the road and Kathy Bates is terrific as Lenore, who has more than a few smart things to say to Tammy.
So here is my biggest problem with the movie: In the first twenty minutes of the movie, Tammy is one of the dumbest humans on the planet. One hour later, she suddenly seems caring, self aware and has the ability to be charming. It's sloppy writing by McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who have tailor made the film for themselves.
We can all buy a character arc, a growth or change in a person over the course of a film, but when it appears out of the blue, it just seems lazy.
Don't get me wrong, I laughed when McCarthy pulled off some hilarious verbal and physical stunts, but compared to the real characters and huge laughs she created in Bridesmaids and The Heat, this is a big disappointment.
McCarthy wears a bag over her head for about 15 minutes of the movie. As a huge fan of hers, I kind of wanted to do the same thing by the final act.
A very inconsistent and disappointing C-.
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