♥♥♥
1980s retro-styled, super-packed poster for Paul Feig's The Heat
Sandra Bullock (Miss Congeniality (2000)) and Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids (2011)) star as an unlikely cop team, one an up-tight, unpopular but professional FBI-agent from New York and the other a street-wise, dangerous and profane Boston cop. Together they are put together to put an end to a drug lord in Boston.
The Heat has earned many differing reactions, from wild praise to death threats. Its writer, Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation (2009-2012)) wanted to make a cop buddy action-comedy in the style of Running Scared (1986) and Lethal Weapon (1987), but with women in the main parts. The result is a sometimes funny, and never action-fueled with excitement movie that is unlike said films because of the grotesqueness of the events and dialog in it. It is closer to the Bad Boys films, but still something very different, more outrageous and less of an action film.
A lot of the humor of The Heat comes from its American inside running gag of a Europe-aligned, modern New-Yorker pitched against an old-USA, Republican, gun-crazed Bostonian cop. This aspect is lost on many people outside of the US, and naturally the film was way bigger in the States than anywhere else.
Great Michigander filmmaker, director Paul Feig's (Bridesmaids (2010)) choice of music for The Heat underlines its outrageousness, being a loud mix of mostly clubbing and dirty hiphop tunes that smash into your ears like beef pompoms.
Marlon Wayans (Respect (2021)) acts as an awkward office commodity in the film, simultaneously looking insulted at and trying to flirt with Bullock's agent Ashburn. The rest of the supporting characters are mostly as thin and unsound as his. That is a problem.
The story never surprises in any way. That opposite type cop characters must partner up and eventually bond is more or less the main convention in the buddy movie sub-genre, and The Heat stays true to it. But around this, nothing new happens, crime or detective-wise. Only the bar scene (and all the other scenes, really) have gotten more outrageous, as this buddy cop comedy aims to ironize the genre while performing in its arena. McCarthy as Mullins gets her laughs from a (sometimes creative) 'insult-everyone'-strategy, while Bullock gets laughs mostly as a pawn for her bossy partner, as when she gets an involuntary make-over in a club bathroom, or when she steps up and becomes outrageous herself, like when she performs throat surgery on a man in a restaurant, who just has some pancake stuck in his mouth, or when she yells at a colleague for using his smartphone, while she's talking, - both funny moments in the film.
I don't have any problems with the buddy cop film being invaded by women here or the fact that The Heat doesn't want to have any romantic element, but then its action and cop plot elements have to work a lot better than they do. The problem is that the film wants to participate in a genre and poke fun at it at the same time.
Mullins' family, headed by her troubled brother (Michael Rapaport (Chuck (2016))) are the civilians we have to hope make it through the crime surge in the film. While some of the very dysfunctional family scenes are quite funny, they don't work in this part. Who cares if these idiots to make it?
Related posts:
Paul Feig: Ghostbusters (2016) - Feig's reboot is the summer's light-heartedly funny, slimy major release
2015 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Spy (2015) - Feig and McCarthy score spy spoof gold!
The Heat (2013) or, Prissy and Offensive in Boston
Top 10: Best comedies reviewed by Film Excess to date
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2011 in films - according to Film Excess
Bridesmaids (2011) - Subversive comedy with laughs a-plenty
1999 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Freaks and Geeks - season 1 (1999) - Feig and Apatow end the 90s with a great youth show
Cost: 43 mil. $
Box office: 229.9 mil. $
= Big hit (returned 5.34 times its cost)
[The Heat premiered 23 June (New York) and runs 117 minutes. Co-producer Peter Chernin bought Dippold's script for 600k $. Bullock was paid 10 mil. $ for her performance; McCarthy 2.5 mil. $. Shooting took place from July - September 2012 in Massachusetts, including in Boston. The film opened #2, behind holdover hit Monsters University, to a 39.1 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 2 weekends in the top 5 (#3-#4), grossing 159.5 mil. $ (69.4 %). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Australia with 13.4 mil. $ (5.8 %) and the UK with 11.2 mil. $ (4.9 %). Talks of a sequel have not materialized. Feig returned with People in New Jersey (2013, TV movie) and theatrically with Spy (2015). Bullock returned in Gravity (2013); McCarthy in Tammy (2014). The Heat is fresh at 66 % with a 6.20/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The Heat?
No comments:
Post a Comment