bad girls bad girls whatcha gonna do
bullock & Mccarthy team up for the heat,
The Heat
If The Heat were based on a book, it would be the Grade 12 chemistry manual by Barbara Nixon-ewing et al. Because while Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy have fantastic presence and chemistry, there isn’t much of what you’d call plot. I would watch these two slug their way through a thicket of bad screenwriting — and that’s pretty much what I was forced to do.
If you’ve missed the trailer, congratulations; some of the best jokes in the film will seem fresh to you. But you’ll need to know a few basics. First, Bullock plays Sarah Ashburn, which is essentially her character from Miss
Congeniality — a straitlaced, highstrung FBI agent who lives to work. She doesn’t have time for a relationship, and can’t even manage to own a cat, although she occasionally borrows her neighbour’s.
Second, McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins, which is essentially her character from everything of late — a brassy, fast-talking gal not afraid to tell it like it is, especially if “it” involves four-letter words. Mullins is a Boston cop who drives a beat-up rambler that looks older than she is. The only people more scared of her than Beantown’s lowlifes are Beantown’s finest, including her boss, Captain Woods (Tom Wilson, Back to
the Future’s Biff Tannen). Ashburn plays everything by the book, much to the annoyance of her colleagues, who can’t stand her arrogant field tactics. She even shows up the drug-sniffing K9 unit. The closest Mullins gets to the book is when she throws it at someone — literally. So we have good cop, mad cop. What are the odds they’ll be forced to work together?
yep. Ashburn is transferred from New York to Boston to track down a high-level drug kingpin. She plans to work her way up from the street, which is where she and Mullins first butt heads.
At times it feels as though both women are playing a note and half too high
Of course, Ashburn is going to learn that it wouldn’t kill her to relax a bit, and Mullins will find out that bluster will only get you so far in law enforcement. But what a drab scenario Katie Dippold (TV’s Parks and Recreation) has drafted to allow for these life lessons to take root.
The two chase after a variety of drug baddies, played variously and mostly forgettably by comedian Spoken reasons, actor Adam ray and others. They cross paths with an albino DEA agent (dan Bakkedahl), whom they get away with making fun of because he’s such a misogynist. This is the same logic that allows McCarthy’s character to take down a black drug dealer with a well-aimed watermelon; he’s the first one to call it racist.
There’s a subplot that has Mullins’ brother (Michael Rapaport) mixed up in the drug trade. This allows for some scenes with her Irish-Boston family, all of them with clam-chowdah accents and manners that make Mark Wahlberg’s clan in The Fighter look like calm and reasonable middle-class citizens. There’s also a scene involving an emergency tracheotomy that puts the “gross-out” — but alas, not the “comedy” — in gross-out comedy.
Bullock and McCarthy do their best to make up for the script. At times it feels as though both women are playing a note and a half too high for the scene they’re in. But at least that keeps them in tune with each other, if not the movie as a whole.
The Heat is the latest from director Paul Feig, who broke out of the TV ghetto with 2011’s Bridesmaids. Its $170-million domestic box office made it the 14th highest grossing film of the year, and the top one that wasn’t part of a franchise or based on a book. McCarthy co-starred in it, and was Oscar-nominated in the role.
Given the stunted comedy returns in this one, maybe Feig & McCarthy isn’t the best pairing for the future. But I’d be willing to give Bullock & McCarthy another chance to perform in a better-written buddy comedy. And no, The Heat 2 doesn’t count. ΠΔ