The comedy formerly known as Untitled Female Buddy Cop Movie lives up to its title
Where do you go after Bridesmaids? Well, director Paul Feig and breakout star Melissa McCarthy (AKA the one who sat on the sink) have opted to ditch the men, rip up the frocks and take a vow of unadulterated comedy. Where Bridesmaids was baggy round its petticoats, doffing its bonnet to romcom mores and spending an age mooning after Chris O'Dowd, The Heat is lean, mean and completely uninterested in anything that isn't funny.
For a long while, it was known as Untitled Female Buddy Cop Movie and, in some ways, it ought to have stayed that way. What we have here is a no-frills makeover of that blokiest of genres. It's gussied up with a feminist ribcage – both of our mismatched crime-fighters are battling institutional misogyny – then accessorised accordingly. So there's the classic scene in which our cops dangle a crim over a balcony by his feet to extract info. But, being women, these two don't have the strength to haul him back up afterwards, so he simply slips from their fingers, down three storeys, to a car below.
Yet like every other buddy cop film, The Heat ultimately stands or falls on the strength of its script and its cast. And this is the real reason – rather than its revisionism – that it's one of those rare comedies you exit actively looking forward to the sequel. Katie Dippold's screenplay drips with zingers, and it's bespoke tailored to the leads: Sandra Bullock, game as ever as an uptight workaholic FBI whiz; McCarthy astonishingly aggressive as a Boston ball-breaker keeping the streets clean by wiping the floor with her enemies.
Those scenes that work least well are the ones with most sistership to Bridesmaids. A gross-out set-piece involving an impromptu tracheotomy could have been cut and pasted from any other Apatowish movie; those moments of female bonding that do come in the last reel add unwanted fluff to the grit. When it sticks to its guns, The Heat is hot stuff indeed.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/01/the-heat-review
Aleksandr Dovzhenko Aleksandr Sokurov Aleksei Balabanov Alektra Blue
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