The Heat centres on an uptight FBI agent (Sandra Bullock) who is assigned to Boston and reluctantly teamed up with a tough, potty-mouthed street cop (Melissa McCarthy) in order to try and take down a drug lord. The two must then try and work together if they’ve any hopes of solving the case.
The plot is as flimsy as it sounds, held together with string and a grasping attempt at female bonding that feels forced and predictable. It’s basically an excuse to team together two polar opposite characters, and indeed actors, with Bullock’s strict and by-the-book agent constantly coming to blows with McCarthy’s streetwise, no-nonsense method of police work.
That lack of a substantial plot – which sits somewhere between Lethal Weapon and an episode of Scooby Doo – would be fine if the character comedy wasn’t so reliant on the constant swearing by McCarthy that feels desparately like its trying to fit in with the cool kids of today’s Hollywood comedy (the This is the End crowd, for instance) and the perpetually ridiculous situations that they find themselves in, most of which are just there to keep reminding us how different these two characters are. They are so broadly drawn with their characteristics played for brash laughs that they never reach any sort of depth even as it peppers the film with attempts at emotion or learning to be accepting of one another’s flaws.
All that is not to say that the film is without its laughs as director Paul Feig (who made the smash hit Bridesmaids) and writer Katie Dippold (TVs Parks and Recreation) find chucklesome moments in the constant bickering between the two and an extended scene in a bar where the duo get drunk – complete with crazy dancing and inappropriate hugging – is the film’s highlight. But above all it’s the likeability of the leads that keep it watchable; the two of them are clearly having a lot of fun in their roles and there’s mileage in the gender switching idea; the girls can, evidently, shoot guns and swear just as much as the guys. Crudeness knows know gender boundaries, it seems.
In its attempts at tipping its hat to the prolific buddy cop movies of the ‘80s, The Heat feels more like a tired rehash of what’s come before except inserting two female cops into the mix usually dominated by men. Thanks to two likeable leads the film is never less than amiable but the paper-thin plot and reliance on foul-mouthed humour at every turn wastes the original potential, putting that and increasingly silly situation comedy ahead of its underwritten characters. Initially the comedy suggests something edgier but it’s ultimately hampered by the need to stick to the clichés of a genre that, if this is anything to go by, is past its sell-by-date.
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