I wonder what else she has in her bag of tricks, though. She’s clearly a gifted and fearless comedian, both verbally and physically. "Tammy" offers glimmers of greater dramatic depth, but while it’s much funnier than it looks, it also features moments of attempted poignancy that don’t always feel earned.

The quality of the cast—which includes Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Allison Janney and Mark Duplass, in a further sign of McCarthy’s power—certainly elevates the premise, which is essentially your standard, desperate road-trip comedy.

When we first meet Tammy, she hits a deer while driving her junker car to her lousy job at a third-rate fast-food restaurant. Arriving in a more late and slovenly state than usual, she promptly clashes with her uptight assistant manager (Falcone himself, who’s been her frequent co-star). He fires her, which means she goes home early, which means she finds her husband (Nat Faxon) having a romantic, home-cooked dinner with next-door neighbor Missi, played by a woefully underused Toni Collette. (Seriously, she gets maybe three lines. It’s a massive waste of a huge talent.)

And so, as she’s done so many times before, Tammy packs up her random belongings and her hideous wardrobe and threatens to leave her small Illinois town, a place so insular and stunting that her mother (Janney) and grandmother (Sarandon) live two doors down. This time, she makes it past the city limits, though, with the help of Grandma Pearl’s Cadillac, Grandma Pearl’s wad of $6,700 in cash and Grandma Pearl herself. Desperate for an adventure, Pearl offers to go along for the ride. She’s also a diabetic who’s forgotten her meds as well as a full-blown alcoholic, which complicates matters.

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