The Heat
I have to say, she might be “America’s sweetheart” with safe, engaging turns in movies such as “While You Were Sleeping,” “The Blind Side,” “Miss Congeniality,” “Speed,” and “The Proposal,” but I like what I saw of Sandra Bullock going blue in “The Heat.” Yes, she’s playing the “straight cop” to Melissa McCarthy’s profane detective, but this is the loosest I’ve seen her in years, and it’s a refreshing sight.
The film is directed by Paul Feig, who was responsible for McCarthy’s breakout performance in 2011’s “Bridesmaids,” and he seems to be enjoy bringing a little vulgarity to female comedies. Clearly, audiences are liking it, as well, as “Bridesmaids” was a huge hit two summers ago, and “The Heat” makes him two-for-two in that department at the box-office. (Personally, “Bridesmaids” wasn’t quite as enjoyable as it tried to be, but clearly, I was in the minority with that one.)
The film, as structured by screenwriter Katie Dippold, is basically a mismatched buddy cop movie, with Bullock as a straight-laced FBI agent sent to Boston to look into drug trafficking in the city. She gets off to a rough start with McCarthy’s Boston PD detective, but eventually, the two start to form a bond. Of course, that also means that the investigation gets somewhat sidetracked as Bullock and McCarthy’s divergent personalities clash, and their pasts catch up with them, but anyone familiar with the genre will know that you can’t keep a good pair of cops down.
Unlike “Bridesmaids,” which seemed to undercut all its laughs by including them in the trailer, “The Heat” left plenty of surprises, and comedic absurdities, for the final film. Among my favorites were the ladies’s run-ins with an albino DEA agent; Marlon Wayans as a Boston-based FBI agent who helps the ladies out, and appears smitten with Bullock; Tom Wilson (better known as Thomas F. Wilson, aka Biff Tannen from “Back to the Future”) as McCarthy’s beaten-down police chief; the way Bullock outshines the drug-sniffing dogs at the scene; and how a couple of details from Bullock’s character’s life pre-Boston come back to bite her while on the case. There’s a lot more, though, and that was one of the more pleasant surprises, along with Bullock’s and McCarthy’s genuine chemistry, that made me glad I finally caught up with “The Heat.”
