Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Jon M. Chu, who directed the concert doc Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, maintains a lively pace, and there's some cute business involving a robot that communicates through music.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The movie's poky and confused, never clearly setting up its conflicts and blowing far too much of its running time on a National Treasure clue-hunt for messages Jem's father programmed into a sassy dancing robot.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Director Jon Chu stretches "Jem" to a ridiculous 2 hours, via endless amateur-musician YouTube clips. Anyone can be a star, they attest - and always be yourself! (Except when you're Jem. I guess.)

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
Jem and the Holograms is Mac and Me to Josie and the Pussycats' E.T.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
There's hardly tension, barely any drama and the sugar high you might expect from an eighties redux is replaced by a dull aspartame buzz.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Its one saving grace is that Chu's direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Jem has lost her outrageousness and gained a robotic sidekick in an overlong, low-budget big-screen reboot of the 1980s toy-selling cartoon series.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
After a few crackling, resonant digital-age scenes in the opening act, the filmmakers settle in and make Jem into a mediocre Disney Channel movie - with, for no good reason, a pet robot.

Name : Molly Lambert / Alias : Grantland
What it lacks in humor it makes up for in sheer weirdness - it's a master class in How Did This Get Made? It feels focus-grouped to within an inch of its life, but it's so strange that it's impossible to imagine what process led us here.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
Hardcore fans won't find much of the Jem they loved under the movie's achingly hip millennial trappings, while young newcomers will be left wondering what a robot has to do with a rock band.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Even though I wish the songs themselves were stronger, there's an energy and a vibrancy to the movie that its young target audience will appreciate.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Not being part of the generation that watched the show, I can't vouch for its merits. But it's safe to say that it must be miles ahead of this wan, bloated screen version which forgoes the original's sci-fi and thriller aspects.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
It seems to be merely tossing ideas into the pot that it thinks might appeal to 9-year-olds.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In revisiting the pop rock quest of a multiracial group of adopted sisters in suburban California, Chu has made a stylish and self-aware musical fantasy for the YouTube generation.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
The film seems inexplicably embarrassed by its roots, instead serving up half-baked and self-consciously contemporary drama that no one in the sure-to-be minimal theatrical audience will remember quite so fondly some 30 years on.

Name : Dan Callahan / Alias : TheWrap
It isn't comedy, and it isn't drama, much less comedy-drama.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Sometimes it's pleasurable enough just watching the most unlikely American comedy star since Bill Murray slip into a groove.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
McCarthy is a national slapstick treasure, but The Boss is a weak-kneed comedy that would topple without her.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
The gifted Melissa McCarthy has spent the bulk of her post-Bridesmaids career elevating so-so material. Add this raunchy comedy to the pile of mediocrity.

Name : Melissa Anderson / Alias : Village Voice
The Boss gives its star few, if any, hitting partners. It's a baffling decision .

Name : Mark Olsen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
It is hard to think of a movie squandering the opportunity of a perfectly timed cultural moment quite like "The Boss."

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
McCarthy remains one of the funniest actors alive - a truth that frequently rescues, but doesn't really redeem, this sloppy comedy .

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"The Boss'' provides the talented Melissa McCarthy plenty of scenery to comically chew on - she is very funny at times - but the story is paper-thin, and the script gives much of the supporting cast the proverbial pink slip.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"The Boss" has zero finesse as a comedy. When Darnell crashes into a wall, or takes a tumble down the stairs, it's alarming and painful, as opposed to funny.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
The loosey-goosey fun might be a bit much at the finish, but it's still a laugh watching McCarthy try to get back on her feet.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The Boss feels like an elongated sketch.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
The movie is all too neat a package for McCarthy's exuberantly inventive comic artistry.

Name : Will Leitch / Alias : The New Republic
By making McCarthy the center of every scene without giving her an actual character to play, Falcone and McCarthy require her to carry more weight that anyone possibly could.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
As in McCarthy's slipshod road movies Identity Thief and Tammy, the material here isn't on her level, the laughs are largely cheap and once again, the hall-of-fame comic actress is stuck in a minor-league movie.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
McCarthy deserves better than this. She can aim higher.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
McCarthy is great - foul-mouthed, funny and fierce. And for those of us who suffered painfully (yet hopefully) through things like "Identity Thief," the movie feels like a healthy step forward.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A few moments are fantastically bonkers, but granting director duties to McCarthy's husband, Ben Falcone, feels more like an act of love than wisdom.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
It's just early April, but I have an early contender for the most loathsome, ill-advised, horrible executed, most spectacularly unfunny movie scene of the year.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
A lot of The Boss works because Michelle Darnell is a funny character, and McCarthy is funny playing her.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
"The Boss" never feels like more than a series of bawdy, R-rated sketches held together by bubble gum and masking tape.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
Well, they can't all be Bridesmaids.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
McCarthy shines when loosely riffing, but the plot tightens around her like a vise.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
There are brief bursts of hilarity, and they are all, without exception, owed to McCarthy's innate charisma and comedic timing.

Name : Molly Eichel / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
McCarthy is such a comedic powerhouse that she can play Michelle with incredible physicality and slapstick while also imbuing the character with wit, cunning, and even ruthlessness.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
McCarthy's trademark blend of chipper likability and treble-voiced rage just isn't quite enough to carry things through.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Although her charisma is still undeniable, there's also no denying that McCarthy is capable of much more than she's allowing herself to do here. There comes a point when every force of nature starts to look just plain forced.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Did you ever think only male comics could obsess over infantile boob, crotch and sex jokes? The Boss will set you straight on that delusion, too.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
This is a lazy Melissa McCarthy vehicle that relies on relentless potty-mouth moments - it's so funny when otherwise decorous characters continually do the vulgar! - and the pratfall comedy of McCarthy.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Even though The Boss is co-written by McCarthy and her husband, director Ben Falcone (who should know his wife's strengths better), the film often strands its title character in shrill one-note caricature, mostly unchallenged.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
World-class gumption and an on-camera look that the pretty committee would applaud can't save a poorly executed comedy whose essential elements are dirty words and falling down.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A hit-and-miss comedy, but McCarthy leads a game cast through several memorable moments.

Name : Leah Pickett / Alias : Chicago Reader
Dinklage is awful as the foppish villain, and aside from one uproarious, ad-libbed riff, McCarthy seems to be on autopilot.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A free-for-all of inappropriate language unsuitable for even the most crass boy's-club boardroom, The Boss can't quite decide if warming the heart or obliterating it with insults is the end goal.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
Nothing in the storyline, direction or character types is remotely fresh.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
I persist in believing that Melissa McCarthy is capable of starring in a movie that not only makes a scads of money but is - you know - good. The latest refutation of my belief is The Boss.

Name : Joe Dziemianowicz / Alias : New York Daily News
"The Boss" doesn't work.