FILM REVIEW Tammy

HOLD ON TIGHT 'Tammy' stars Melissa McCarthy (left) and Susan Sarandon.

The road to nowhere


Danial Carey

IF you type ‘Falling Down restaurant scene’ into Google, you’re likely to be see a trailer for the new Melissa McCarthy vehicle ‘Tammy’. This may persuade you to think that if you enjoyed ‘Falling Down’, you’ll like ‘Tammy’. Don’t bet on it.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, Joel Schumacher’s 1993 crime drama starred Michael Douglas as William Foster, who goes on a violent rampage across Los Angeles. It includes a scene at a food-food restaurant in which Foster, told it is too late to order breakfast, pulls out a gun.
He then orders a ‘double Whammyburger with cheese’, but is enraged to be handed a ‘sorry, miserable, squashed thing’, rather than the enticing product – ‘plump, juicy, three inches thick’ – advertised above the counter. “Can anybody tell me what’s wrong with this picture?” he wonders aloud.
Well, there’s quite a lot wrong with ‘Tammy’, although it also includes two memorable scenes set in fast-food restaurants. It’s a personal project for McCarthy; she wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, who directs and plays a small part.
McCarthy was hilarious in ‘Bridesmaids’ and decent in ‘The Heat’ with Sandra Bullock, even if she is playing essentially the same character over and over. But the missed opportunity that was ‘Identity Thief’ (in which she played the titular con artist alongside Jason Bateman) was a work of cinematic genius compared to ‘Tammy’.
What do you do if your most forgettable recent work was ‘a road trip with too few laughs’ – this newspaper’s description of ‘Identity Thief’? Well, if you’re McCarthy, you plot another road trip with almost no laughs, or structure.
There’s plenty of talent involved in the picture, even if the casting is a bit odd. McCarthy (aged 43) plays Tammy, whose mother is played by Allison Janney (54) from ‘The West Wing’, while Susan Sarandon (66) plays Pearl, the cash-rich grandmother who joins her on the road. Toni Collette, Kathy Bates, Sandra Oh and Dan Aykroyd also feature.
The eponymous character is having a bad day. She’s wrecked her car, got fired from her job at a greasy burger joint, and returns home to find her husband carrying on with a neighbouring woman.
For reasons never made clear, her response is to leave the house and hit the road, with cash and car provided by her maternal granny. Given Sarandon’s involvement, comparisons with ‘Thelma and Louise’ are inevitable, which does not work in the newer movie’s favour.
Tammy is not a sympathetic character. She drives while drunk, crashes into deer, and repeatedly throws garbage out the window like it’s 1955. Whenever she disagrees with someone, she’s in the habit of knocking over something over before leaving.
Nor is she the brightest button in the box. “I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon,” says Pearl. “On his bike?” asks Tammy, having confused the astronaut with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.
In fact, neither of the two main characters have much to recommend themselves. Pearl is an alcoholic who calls her grand-daughter a ‘cheeseburger’ and made a pass at her son-in-law. Tammy steals her gran’s car and leaves the older woman behind. A fast-food robbery scene provides a few laughs, but the tone shifts constantly, and the finished product is neither funny nor moving. Like its protagonist, ‘Tammy’ flits from one thing to another with no sense of what it wants to say or where it wants to go.
To quote from Christy Moore’s ‘Lisdoonvarna’: “Is this heaven? Is this hell? Who cares? Who can tell? Anyone for the last few choc-ices?”

TAMMY
Rating: 3/10