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Critics Consensus: Life of the Party's good-natured humor and abundance of onscreen talent aren't enough to make up for jumbled direction and a script that misses far more often than it hits.
Critic Consensus: Life of the Party's good-natured humor and abundance of onscreen talent aren't enough to make up for jumbled direction and a script that misses far more often than it hits.
All Critics (138) | Top Critics (33) | Fresh (52) | Rotten (86) | DVD (1)
The pat drama and the mild conflicts of "Life of the Party" leave McCarthy with little chance to shine, despite her near-constant presence onscreen.
Life of the Party doesn't live up to either of the nouns in its title.
Melissa McCarthy is comedy royalty - it's a scientific fact, look it up - but even the Bridesmaids star can't keep this mom-goes-to-college fluffball from flatlining.
Falcone and McCarthy seem so concerned with delivering on their audience's pratfall assumptions that they never allow McCarthy to expand her capabilities in any meaningful way.
Life of the Party is proof that even the funniest actors need good material, which makes it all the more disappointing that McCarthy wrote the script with director Ben Falcone, who is also her husband.
Life of the Party is harmless good fun. And sometimes that's enough.
[McCarthy's] mishaps and triumphs are breezy enough; yet, for the most part, the laughs don't come.
Somewhere inside the rushed, commercial shell of Life of the Party lies an unformed but much better film merely hinted at in this release.
It's a fine example of a Melissa McCarthy vehicle, a film constructed primarily to allow her to unleash her own particular brand of mania and physicality on the viewing public. If you dig that, as I do, then you're going to have a great time.
Fresh comedy starring one of the best female comedians of our generation. What else do we need? [Full review in Spanish].
It takes until the film's second half for this party to find any life, but the latest Mellissa McCarthy/Ben Falcone collaboration still feels devoid of any larger sense of purpose.
The plot of Life of the Party often feels like filler that only exists to link the comedic scenes together and consequently everything else about it suffers.
Melissa McCarthy is really hit and miss for me. This is watchable, but that's the best I could say for it. There's a lot of gross humor, which I personally don't like. It actually started off okay too and I had hopes it might be funny, but it never really lifts to what it could be.
Super Reviewer
I'm becoming a little exhausted by Melissa McCarthy. When she's put in a group, sure, she works well. On her own though, it just never seems to stand. With the exception of Spy, which even then I didn't think was that great, all her movies are profoundly meh. They're not even bad necessarily, just meh. It's the same thing here. The story is cute I guess (though we've seen it before), the characters are fine, and there were one or two jokes that were genuinely funny. But was it worth those one or two jokes for the overall period where I was just kinda' bored by the movie? The movies not good, but it's not really bad either. It just...is.
The third time's a charm for writer/director Ben Falcone and his wife/collaborator Melissa McCarthy. After making the abysmal Tammy together and the more competent if not still narratively flawed The Boss, the husband/wife creative team have finally delivered a movie that has not just a fun enough comedic presence, but characters that really click and who are put in situations that we can't wait to see them thrive or hysterically try to survive in. Low expectations may have played a role, but from the get-go we are aware of who McCarthy's Deanna is; we've met someone like her in our own lives. Her sweaters are beyond glorious. The supporting cast of Gillian Jacobs as Coma Girl, Debby Ryan as the token mean girl, Jessie Ennis as this completely weird, but totally endearing fellow sorority sister to Deanna's daughter, Maddie (Molly Gordon), are each fantastic in their own well-defined way. That's not mentioning SNL's Heidi Gardner as Deanna's agoraphobic new roommate, Chris Parnell as a corny archaeology professor, Matt Walsh as the tool bag ex-husband and Julie Bowen as his new bride-to-be who are each provided their moments to shine. Think that's all? Nope. Maya Rudolph steals every scene she's in, Stephen Root and Jacki Weaver are adorably clueless as Deanna's parents, and Luke Benward who initially seems he will serve no purpose other than eye candy turns in a strong comedic turn and whose role in the story sets up one of the best and most surprising scenes the movie has to offer. The "80's party" and oral presentation scenes solidify just how much fun this movie is to experience if you're not already on board with everything going on by the time we get into these sequences, but even better is the fat Life of the Party is consistently hilarious. I can't wait to watch this again and share it with more people.
Just in time for Mother's Day weekend comes two eminently bland, safe, and unmemorable movies that generally waste their female stars. Melissa McCarthy has proven herself one of the most funny and dynamic performers in comedy, but Life of the Party is a listless and groan-inducing back-to-school comedy that feels tonally off, adopting the persona of its tacky, talky, and awkward middle-aged mother. You would think the premise would lead to plenty of R-rated shenanigans, but instead the film adopts a very sedate PG-13 atmosphere, dulling the wild collegiate experience into something so predictable and safe as to be completely inoffensive. It feels like a caricature reminiscent of a feature-length rendition of a Saved by the Bell: The College Years. McCarthy falls back on tired, corny jokes that don't attempt to be anything else, and the supporting cast is left to gasp and grasp for anything to spark laughs (special credit Gillian Jacobs for doing everything possible as "coma girl"). McCarthy is best when given room to improvise and discover interesting odd angles for jokes, but she also needs a stronger comedic vision, and that's not going to come from husband/co-writer/director Ben Falcone (Tammy). It feels like they had a general outline for a comedy and, in grand collegiate tradition, pulled an all-nighter and sloppily finished a serviceable draft. I chuckled about four times, mostly involving an exuberant Maya Rudolph and the one clever structural payoff revolving around a much younger fraternal hookup. Mostly, Life of the Party lacks a sense of stakes, credibility, surprises, development, and laughs, though the middle-aged mothers in my preview screening lapped it up, so take my opinion with a grain of salt if the trailer seemed moderately appealing for you. Nate's Grade: C-
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