The past few years, Melissa McCarthy has fallen into a rut of playing brash, silly characters with oversized glasses and bad hair. Her movies are always serviceable, because she’s great, but they’re never groundbreaking. So that’s pretty much all I expected from Life of the Party. But Life of the Party is more than serviceable—it’s wonderful!
McCarthy plays Deanna, the fortysomething mom of a college senior, and when her husband unceremoniously dumps her for a blonde real-estate agent, she decides to go back to college at the same school as her daughter.