The Heat
I sense that director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) realized this. That's why he spends so much of the film focusing on his stars, and not on the generic drug dealing plot that carries the action. Bullock and McCarthy play off of each other so well, and get off some very funny one liners, it almost makes you forget that the movie surrounding them is pretty empty. Does he rely on his stars perhaps a bit too much? Maybe. The movie almost hits the two hour mark in length, and the charm of the stars isn't enough to keep the last 15 or 20 minutes from dragging. That's when the movie starts to turn needlessly violent and graphic. The two leads remain likable through all of this, but I liked it better when they were tossing out one-liners, instead of blowing away faceless and uninteresting villains.
Sandra Bullock plays straight-laced FBI agent, Sarah Ashburn, a woman who is successful on the job, but so lonely in her personal life, she has to steal her neighbor's cat just for companionship. Her latest assignment, which could lead to a long-overdue promotion, takes her to Boston to hunt down a drug kingpin. Although Sarah is great at what she does, she does not work well with her fellow agents. That's why her boss has assigned her to work with police detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) on her latest assignment. Shannon seems to have been created to irritate Sarah to no end. She's sloppy, she doesn't follow the rules, she's violent and vulgar, with pretty much every other word of her dialogue being a word I can't print in a family-friendly review (she's pretty much the reason the film earns its hard-R rating), and she seems to have a total disregard for authority above her at her job.
Will Sarah and Shannon be able to put aside their differences, shut down the drug dealers, and wind up becoming unlikely best friends in the process? The answers are as easy to predict as predicting that the sun will rise in the East, and set in the West tomorrow. Regardless, it can't be denied that Bullock and McCarthy not only play their individual characters well, but have wonderful chemistry together. Watching The Heat, I began to realize that I would like to see them do more films together, they're that good. They not only work well together, they also get some very funny lines off of each other. Whenever the movie is just focused on them and their partnership, I was able to look past the storytelling flaws. The script by Katie Dippold has a number of lines that may be a little too clever, but are funny nonetheless. My favorite line is when a character tells McCarthy's Shannon that she looks like "one of the Campbell Soup kids who grew up to be an alcoholic".
I also enjoyed the scenes dealing with Shannon's dysfunctional family. Why they weren't used more often, I have no idea, as they deliver the biggest laughs outside of the two lead characters. Everything else about the movie falls a little flat. The drug dealing plot seems to have been ripped right out of "generic cop thriller screenwriting 101", complete with a twist that someone within the force is a mole for the villains. There's also a surprising amount of insult humor targeted at a put-upon albino cop that is unnecessarily mean-spirited, and seems completely out of place with the rest of the film. The uneven tone of the script wasn't enough to dampen my enjoyment of what was working, but it still made me wish for another rewrite or two before the cameras started rolling.
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