Review: "The Bronze"

Tonya Harding meets Tracy Flick from “Election” meets “Fargo” Chief Marge Gunderson -- that’s our first impression of Hope Annabelle Greggory.

Melissa Rauch stars in and co-wrote (with husband Winston) this comedy about a has-been Olympic gymnast that aims to set a new standard in foul-mouthed raunch.

It’s not as outwardly crude as, say, the “Hangover” movies. But Hope Annabelle -- don’t you dare short her a name! -- may just be the most purely nasty protagonist we’ve seen onscreen in a while.

Heck, even the lead in “Bad Santa” finds his mushy heart in the end. When she arrives at her version of the Niceville depot, Hope Annabelle still calls a guy with a facial tic “Twitchy” -- and this is the fellow she’s in love with.

Directed by Bryan Buckley, the movie walks a careful line to keep the character from becoming too unlikeable … and sometimes falters from that line. We’re caught between laughing at Hope Annabelle and cringing at her hateful antics. It works in stretches, until it doesn’t.

Rauch is a hoot, and I admired the way she could bring to a life a character so defined by utter bile. I went to college for two years in Oberlin, a few clicks south of Amherst, so I can attest she got the pinched-vowels accent and big-fish-small-pond chutzpah down pat.

The setup is HA (sorry, tired of spelling it out) was a darling of the 2004 Olympics as a teen gymnast in the Kerri Strug mold. She came back from a torn Achilles to land the U.S. team a bronze medal. It earned her the requisite 15 minutes of fame, a tour with “Dancing with the Stars” and the seemingly eternal gratitude of her hometown of Amherst, Ohio.

HA has reacted to this generous outpouring with … an incredible sense of self-importance and delusion. Now 30ish and long washed up from competition, she still wanders around town dressed in her red, white and blue jumpsuit from 2004, milking the local retailers for free Sbarro’s, sneakers, sundaes and weed.

She swears and tosses insults like a dyspeptic sailor, and nobody ever really takes offense. I guess when you’re the biggest star to ever come out of a small town -- as in “Welcome to Our City, Home of So-and-So” -- people will tolerate a mountain of abuse.

Pointy-chinned and petite -- deceptively so, as we’ll see -- HA has got the immovable blonde bangs and permanent sneer of a spoiled brat who never grew up. She still lives with her long-suffering single dad (Gary Cole), a postal worker who sacrificed to raise a champion. Now the champ breaks into his mail truck to steal cash out of envelopes and makes a pretense of looking for a job.

When her tough old Slavic coach dies, HA receives a letter saying she’ll receive a large inheritance -- but only if she coaches the town’s rising young gymnastics star, “Mighty” Maggie Townsend (Haley Lu Richardson, impossibly pert) in the upcoming (fictional) Toronto Olympics. She’s torn, since if successful the ingénue’s star will eclipse her own.

Riding along is Ben (Thomas Middleditch), who runs the decaying old gym and clearly has a long-simmering thing for HA, which she returns with contempt and later with… slightly less contempt.

The film wisely keeps the actual gymnastics stuff to a bare minimum, with stunt doubles as needed. Sebastian Stan plays a smarmy old Olympics flame-turned-rival in the coaching game.

Speaking of body doubles, they pretty obviously use some for a crazily gymnastic sex scene that seems like they’re trying to do a human version of the one with puppets from “Team America: World Police.” I think this is intentional, though, with the apparent decoys adding to the comedy quotient.

For the record, Rauch has said in interviews that’s really her. But the bounty of conveniently placed shadows, hair dangling over faces and cutaways to shoulders-and-up closeups of Rauch leave me a Doubting (Peeping?) Thomas.

In the end I admire the pluck of “The Bronze” more than the movie itself. It’s heartening to see a movie go really out there in tone. It’s better when they stick the landing.

Film review: "Tammy"

McCarthy Does Mumblecore.

That's my three-word review of Melissa McCarthy's new comedy "Tammy," an oft-turgid wallow in sentiment and icky embarrassing humor. It's still got some genuine laughs, and is buoyed by McCarthy's winning screen presence. It's not a long movie at 96 minutes, yet you could easily chop a half-hour out of it and have a winner.

Mumblecore, for those not into zero-budget indie films, is epitomized by rambling dialogue that has the appearance of being ad-libbed. Its influence on mainstream comedy is clear to see, though usually it's punky young guys -- think Jonah Hill or Michael Cera -- with the verbal diarrhea.

After an impressive string of hits including "The Heat" and "Identity Thief," McCarthy is currently sitting in the unlikely catbird's seat as Hollywood's most consistently bankable star over the last few years. She's running the show on her projects, and has decided to team up with her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with her and makes his directing debut.

He frequently turns up in her movies as her beau, though here he just has a bit part as the jerk boss at the Topper Jack's burger joint where she works.

The result of their collaboration is a raunchy road trip comedy starring McCarthy and Susan Sarandon as her grandmother. They have some fairly predictable misadventures, some romantic hook-ups, binge drinking and petty larceny.

In the end, we all Learn Something -- in this case, that McCarthy had better find some new material if she wants to keep her streak alive.

The story starts off with an epic bad day for Tammy. Living in tiny Murphysboro, Ill., she crashes her ancient Corolla into a deer on the way to work, then gets fired for being late. Arriving home unexpectedly early, she's surprised to find her husband (Nat Faxon) serving an elegant dinner to his mistress (Toni Collette). Tammy promptly packs her stuff and decamps to her parents' place, two doors down.

"You never cooked me dinner!" she shrieks. "And it smells good, too!"

But her mom, played by Allison Janney, is something of a pill. Tammy's grandmother Pearl (Sarandon) lives with her but has had enough, so the pair take off for an impromptu jaunt for parts unknown with $6,700 of grandma's cash as their stake.

It's sort of a Thelma & Louise thing, with a cross-generational twist.

The ages of the actresses don't exactly sync up, with less than a quarter-century dividing them all -- McCarthy is only 11 years younger than Janney, who in turn is only 13 years Sarandon's junior. It is rather strange to see Sarandon, whose potent sexual presence has lit up screens for four decades, doing the cranky oldster routine complete with puffy feet from diabetes.

The running joke is that Tammy is the hard-partying cutup of the family, but Granny Pearl is at least her equal despite her prim outward appearance. She's a nasty drunk, supplies teenagers with beer and boasts of having been an Allman Brothers groupie.

Kathy Bates and Sandra Oh turn up late in the game as wealthy lesbian friends of Pearl's, who help them out when they're on the lam from the law. Bates lights up her scenes, feisty yet down-to-earth, and has one emotional crescendo that feels like it belongs in another movie.

Actually, most of "Tammy" feels like it belongs in another flick. McCarthy may be all that as a screen comedienne, but she and her hubby needed to run their screenplay through the spin cycle a few more times.