Yeah. What a waste of talent and potential. Here you have an Oscar winner and an Oscar nominee. Both are very funny women. And both are surrounded by a cast and crew of good comedians--Bridesmaids director, Paul Feig, who's normally a talented comedy director, Katie Dippold, a writer from probably the best comedy on TV right now, Parks and Recreation, and a veritable who's-who of really funny, great comedy actors, like SNL's Taran Killam, Mad TV's Michael McDonald, Kaitlin Olsen from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the list continues. So it's a complete wonder how such a great team of funny people can make a movie that not only falls flat on several occasions, but also gets incredibly tired as well.
The premise of The Heat goes as follows: FBI Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is damn good at her job, but not at all a team player. She's high strung, and prim and proper to the near point of OCD. And the way she is has alienated her to any sort of real friends, to the point that she has to steal her neighbor's cat for company. She gets transferred to an assignment to go after a drug lord in Boston. On the opposite side of the tracks beat Boston detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is brash, crass, and tough-as-nails, devoid of any tact or class. She does whatever the hell she wants and needs to do to protect her streets. When the drug dealer she's trying to arrest ends up being a key part of Ashburn's investigation, the two women cross paths, they team up, and their odd-couple contrasting personalities lead to various hi-jinks.
The whole exercise proves to be a formulaic buddy cop comedy, honestly. Two law-enforcement agents--one a wild card, the other a by-the-book type--start out hating each other, get to know each other, and are BFFs by the end. Granted that a movie like this does not need to be Shakespeare, but with two strong leads, you'd think they would have at least tried to do something different, much like Will Farrell's buddy cop comedy, The Other Guys--which was a straight up spoof. Unfortunately, The Heat is not ambitious enough to take the genre and lampoon it to ridiculous proportions, like that film. It's really playing things safe and straight, relying far too heavily on the two-dimensional characters Bullock and McCarthy are playing.
Though both women are talented actresses, and do their part to play their roles well, the unfortunate thing is how thinly these characters are written. Bullock's arrogant, type-A agent stays that way through the entire movie, only learning at the very end how to be a team player because of her relationship with McCarthy (who could have seen that coming). McCarthy's Mullins on the other hand, is the same schtick she's been playing since Bridesmaids--loud, obnoxious, crude. Between Bridesmaids, Identity Thief, and this, it seems to be the only role she can play. She's quickly becoming the female Kevin James in my opinion. And the welcome these characters get is completely worn out by the first 20 minutes of the movie because their gags get incredibly old. There's only so much of the "oh no, I'm so uptight" meets "oh,wow, I'm foul-mouthed and violent" bit you can take before nothing surprises you, and everything starts to feel forced. It's complete overkill and neither character is really all that interesting, nor is their relationship or the chemistry between them. The only thing redeeming about these characters is that they have pretty real problems that dictate the way they are. McCarthy's character is dealing with lots of familial issues involving the relationship with her and her criminal brother, while Bullock's character must contend with the fact that she's adopted and unliked by her peers. This might justify why the characters are the way they are, but it doesn't change the fact that they essentially stay pretty stagnant through the entire film.
Furthermore, the most of the other gags themselves fall completely flat. There's maybe only a handful of genuinely funny scenes in the movie, including a bar night where McCarthy and Bullock get completely drunk and go nuts, an emergency tracheostomy in a diner, a few scenes with McCarthy's family (including former SNL veteran, Jane Curtain), and a knife scene involving Sandra Bullock's leg. But other than that the entirety of my theatre, myself included, sat there in silence as gag after gag passed without so much as a chuckle here and there. The comedy is actually pretty lazy overall, becoming pretty trite more than anything.
The talented cast really does try their hardest to be funny, but they're overcompensating for the lazy script, to the point where it's really just trying too hard. To see Bullock and McCarthy carry on a schtick that's just not funny to begin with, but have them stay with it, is almost a train wreck--for example a scene where McCarthy is "looking for her captain's balls". The idea is funny at first, but drags on way too long, as the length tries to overcompensate for how stale the joke gets. The problem is the stale joke just gets rubbed in our faces--and if it didn't really work that well the first time, it won't 5 minutes later.
And that pretty much sums up the spirit of the movie. It's a giant one-note joke that carries on way too long, despite its stars trying to make it work, coupled with a formulaic buddy cop story that's been done over and over and over again. I'll give it credit for being a female buddy cop movie, which is so rarely done. But just because you turn the leads of a typical buddy cop movie into women, doesn't mean you're reinventing the wheel here. The Heat brings nothing new to the table in terms of the subgenre, making it lazy as a cop movie and as a comedy. As I said in the beginning of the review, what a waste.
Overall Rating: C
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