Mark Reviews Movies: SUPERINTELLIGENCE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 25, 2020

In Superintelligence, the fate of humanity apparently depends on the success of a couple in a romantic-comedy setup. It's strangely fascinating to watch Steve Mallory's screenplay begin with seemingly endless possibilities, only to constantly narrow its ambitions from one formula to another.

The premise is somewhat inspired. In it, an ordinary woman discovers that an artificial intelligence has decided that, based on her behavior, she will determine what the sentient program will do with the human race: save them, enslave them, or destroy them. After spending just a little time with Carol Peters (Melissa McCarthy), the single human being whose words and actions will secure or doom the future of humankind, we start thinking that humanity doesn't stand much of a chance.

That's a pretty decent joke, and if it were the foundation of this movie, it might have stood a better chance than humans do in this setup. We could watch Carol bumble and fumble, misspeak and misstep, and otherwise royally screw up this one opportunity to better humanity, instead condemning every person on Earth to servitude or destruction. McCarthy, who's so good at playing the kindhearted and endearing fool, probably would have been likeable as an accidental bringer of our species' demise.

There's some of that joke in director Ben Falcone's movie. Like so many vehicles for or movies that exploit McCarthy's effortless comedic charms, though, this one sets aside storytelling concerns, internal logic, and the promise of its premise to grant McCarthy as many opportunities as possible to improvise jokes, perform pratfalls, and fool around with freedom. She remains funny and, as the romance becomes the focus here, charming, but as Mallory sets aside the clever part of his setup, the movie becomes entirely about how funny and charming McCarthy can be.

Living alone in Seattle and doing a variety of odd jobs to make a living, Carol is kind of at a personal and professional dead end. After an awkward job interview goes as badly as she expected (The whole scene revolves around McCarthy struggling with a giant beanbag chair, which isn't exactly a good omen for the rest of the movie's comedy), Carol awakens the following morning to a strange voice, emanating from just about every piece of technology in her apartment.

It is the recently sentient A.I. called Super Intelligence, which informs Carol of its plan to use her as a guinea pig in its observations of humanity. The A.I. even takes on the voice of James Corden, her favorite celebrity, to make the news of her substantial role in humankind's fate a bit easier to bear.

Three major plot lines emerge from this. At first, Carol is terrified by the pressure of her situation, but Super Intelligence gives her a bunch of gifts—paying off her student loan debts, a $10 million deposit into her bank account, a smart car, some new clothes at a high-end boutique store. Are these gifts a test of her decency, or do they simply serve as a rationale for McCarthy's comic reactions, her riffs (There's a montage, naturally, of her trying on and commenting upon a variety of ridiculous outfits), and her occasional tumbles (The car boots her out, sending her flying across the street)? Since the movie never quite gives us a sense of what the A.I. is doing and how its plan to observe Carol actually works, we have to assume the latter option.

Another plot has Carol's best friend Dennis (Brian Tyree Henry) trying to figure out the A.I. and, with the help of the United States government (Jean Smart plays an unnamed President who looks, well, like a bit of wish fulfillment more than anything else), determining how to stop whatever its plan is without modern technology. It at least keeps the A.I. in our minds, since Mallory more or less abandons it for the second part of Carol's story.

In that part, Carol tries to reconcile with her ex-boyfriend George (Bobby Cannavale), a professor who is about to leave to teach in Ireland for a year. For all of its power and potential, Super Intelligence basically becomes a matchmaker, a personal assistant, and an encourager of romance for all of this.

Look, McCarthy and Cannavale do their best and have some nice chemistry, but how and why does Carol and George's future happiness together actually fit into the A.I.'s plan? It's never clear, even when Super Intelligence states it outright. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, the movie repeatedly tells us that there are global blackouts, but everything seems just fine—plenty of electricity and even international flights—in Carol's neck of the woods.

All of these shifts in story and tone are so sudden and severe that we start to wonder if Mallory cobbled this screenplay together from two or three different drafts, each with a completely different central concept. Superintelligence is less a fully formed movie and more a collection of ideas—a few of them good, most of them middling, none of them really connecting.

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