Cecily Strong of “SNL” gets zero comic traction as Bell’s overbearing boss, while Kathy Bates plays Michelle’s mentor, a wealthy horse-farm owner who drops a couple of F-bombs, then mounts up and rides away. The film admirably assembles a roster of funny women, then mostly squanders their screen time. The versatile Bell, meanwhile, is sentenced to straight-man status as Michelle’s long-suffering, single-mom assistant. But there’s an inherent sweetness to McCarthy that Falcone can’t (or won’t) tamp down, rendering her more fabulous than fearsome. We are meant to believe she’s ruthless, loathed by her peers, deserving of being brought low by the indictment (arranged by her jilted ex, played with minimal effort by Peter Dinklage). The film seems unsure how to view Michelle. Upon her release, she leans on former personal assistant Claire (Bell, depressingly underused) for a place to crash. Here, she’s Michelle Darnell, an financial self-help guru who goes from being “the 47th wealthiest woman in the country” to an insider-trading convict. The film was produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, which makes sense: Like Ferrell, McCarthy is intrinsically funny, capable of transcending subpar material with a single tilt of the head or tumble down a flight of stairs (one of McCarthy’s specialties).

What could have been “Role Models”-type raunch with a girl-power mantra is instead only a sporadically amusing vanity project.

It’s a shame “The Boss,” co-written and directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, doesn’t run with this conceit. “Next week I’m thinking maybe they’ll arrange marriages,” she mutters, and launches a rival, brownie-hawking troop whose logo, as co-star Kristen Bell observes, has a sort of Communist Japan-Black Panthers aesthetic. As a former financial titan forced to start over, Melissa McCarthy (“Spy”) is at her best when sticking it to the Dandelions, a Scout-esque troop dedicated to selling cookies and earning badges for dubious designations like “social butterfly.” It’s the rare movie heroine who has the ovaries to take down the Girl Scouts.

How long is the boss movie