Thunder Force Parent Guide

What if only villains had superpowers?

This is the premise behind Thunder Force, Netflix’s new superhero comedy. Interstellar cosmic rays have hit the earth, triggering genetic changes and bestowing superpowers on people with a genetic predisposition to psychopathy. The world is now menaced by violent, cruel superhumans known as miscreants, who can easily outmaneuver the police.

When the miscreants’ reign of terror leaves two scientists dead, their daughter Emily (Octavia Spencer) vows to complete their work and find a way to use genetic sequencing to bestow powers on ordinary people who are committed to fighting evil. As Emily’s decades of scientific research culminate in formulas that will produce super strength and invisibility, her old friend, Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) comes for an uninvited visit and inadvertently undergoes one of the treatments.

At its heart, Thunder Force is an “Odd Couple” buddy pic – a tale of mismatched friends who must work together, balance their widely divergent strengths, forgive past wrongs, and find common cause against a greater evil. In this it largely succeeds, giving audiences a story of two protagonists who manage to move beyond the past and unite in the face of evil, violence, and treachery. There’s a decent emotional arc here and it largely works.

Thunder Force is also trying to be two other films; somewhat less successfully. First, it’s a superhero flick and while it does an okay job, it doesn’t stand out in a crowded field. In fact, it has a vaguely amateur feel, although it still manages a certain cockeyed charm. Second, it’s a midlife comedy and an extremely mediocre one at that. This should be the easiest part of the film to pull off but the laughs just aren’t there. Admittedly, Ms. Spencer’s acting is uneven, but Ms. McCarthy’s comic talents should be more than enough to carry this material. It’s worth noting that Ms. McCarthy also feels flat at times in the film: perhaps having her trademark crude comedy toned down has left her adrift, unsure of how to fill the void.

As for content issues, this is a superhero movie, so parents can expect frequent scenes of highly sanitized superhero violence. There’s nothing here you haven’t already seen in a Marvel comic movie – and far less of it, in fact. This is also a Melissa McCarthy movie, which will be cause for more concern, fully justified by the film’s profanity and crude sexual innuendo. Given the PG-13 rating, Ms. McCarthy’s trademark bawdy humor has been dialed back but the movie would be better without the scenes of Emily licking the claw of the half-creant, Crab (Jason Bateman), and smearing butter all over his pincers as she eyes him seductively. The script also leans into the yuck factor with repeated scenes of Emily vomiting and an icky side-effect of her treatments that gives her a craving for raw chicken. Watching Emily repeatedly hoover down slimy chicken cutlets leaves me gagging and freaking out about salmonella poisoning.

Thunder Force is one of those movies that falls neatly into the “dumb fun” category. It lands more heavily on the “dumb” side than on the “fun” side of the scale, but it still has plenty of amusing moments, if you can stand the many awkward ones. It’s not a thundering cinematic achievement, and it’s not going to explode across the entertainment universe, but it’s far from being the worst thing on Netflix.