Thunder Force

The idea of pairing two versatile high-profile stars as charismatic everyday female superheroes might seem appealing. Yet in Thunder Force, they’re rendered powerless by a lackluster script.

Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer outshine the material in this uninspired variation on familiar concepts involving mutants living among us, and the bickering partners who must put aside their differences to save the day.

The story opens in 1983, when a menacing species known as the Miscreants begins wreaking havoc on crime-ridden Chicago. That’s about the same time that loose-cannon Lydia (McCarthy) and nerdy Emily (Spencer) bond as teenage classmates, and eventually drift apart.

Flash forward a couple of decades, and Emily is a prestigious scientist working on some top-secret research to finally rid the city of their adversarial invaders. She’s paid a surprise visit by Lydia, who wants to clear up their estrangement but instead literally stumbles into becoming a test subject.

A few montages later, Lydia and Emily comprise a tandem of blue-collar wonder women — the former with super strength and the latter benefiting from invisibility. Harnessing those abilities can be a challenge, however, as they form a crime-fighting unit with Lydia’s precocious daughter (Taylor Mosby) and a former intelligence official (Melissa Leo) in their corner.

Their target is a corrupt mayoral candidate (Bobby Cannavale) whose Miscreant henchmen include a laser-shooting enforcer (Pom Klementieff) and a smooth-talker (Jason Bateman) with crab claws for arms.

The film marks the fifth feature collaboration between McCarthy and her husband, director Ben Falcone (The Boss), and this latest entry adds to their spotty shared resume.

We’ve seen McCarthy play this sort of crude if well-intentioned goofball role multiple times before. Nevertheless, as the lovable loser of the duo, she and Spencer achieve an appealing odd-couple chemistry.

Despite some scattered laughs, Falcone’s thinly sketched screenplay too often settles for forced quirks and low-brow slapstick. For a film meant to grounded in its gritty urban milieu, both heroes and villains feel more cartoonish than relatable. A romantic subplot goes nowhere, the science-fiction element is underdeveloped, and the superpower boundaries are never clearly defined.

Thunder Force is more effective as a buddy comedy than a superhero saga, but its effort to combine the two feels labored and uneven. It’s not funny enough to work as a genre send-up, and not clever enough to deliver the fanboy goods.

Rated PG-13, 106 minutes.