Plus-sized comic's roadie romp

MELISSA McCarthy is a comedienne who is refreshingly un-selfconscious about roles in which she relentlessly pokes fun at herself. In recent years, she's carved a comfortable niche by playing the glamour-free klutz and small-town girl with the plus-sized body and R-rated vocabulary with admirable verve and a good deal of voracity: what you see is what you get, and her characters simply tell it like it is.

In Tammy, a film conceived and written by McCarthy together with husband Ben Falcone (who also directed), she lays it all on the line by getting into the skin of the title character - an unflinching underdog who never met a cheeseburger (or three) she didn't like. The movie gives us a larger-than-life glimpse of lower-middle-class America, and it's not pretty.

Unfortunately, Tammy is not very funny either. In Bridesmaids (2011) and to a lesser degree The Heat (2013), McCarthy proves she had a commanding screen presence and also displayed a knack for physical comedy. Here, she once again takes a page from the buddy-movie playbook and tweaks it until it hurts. The result is a mish-mash of comic scenes and random ideas: part road trip, part romantic comedy and all terribly out-of-sync.