The Heat (2013) or, Prissy and Offensive in Boston

11/01/2013

The Heat (2013) or, Prissy and Offensive in Boston

♥♥♥

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?

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

Watch a 1-minute clip from the film here

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?

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Donald Sutherland has passed away

Born in Canada, Sutherland battled polio as a child. His first credit was in Suspense (1963, TV-series) and his first film was The Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Later credits in his remarkable career include The Saint (1965-66), The Dirty Dozen (1967), M*A*S*H (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Klute (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), 1900 (1976), Casanova (1976), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Ordinary People (1980), A Dry White Season (1989), JFK (1991), Outbreak (1995), Fallen (1998), Virus (1999), Fierce People (2005), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Lord of War (2005), The Hunger Games (2012), The Undoing (2020, miniseries) and many more. He passed away at age 88. R.I.P.

Roger Corman has passed away

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Corman had a sprawling, intellectually hungry life as a youth and young man before arriving with his first film in 1955, Five Guns West. He would follow that with titles such as Apache Woman, It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Cave Man, A Bucket of Blood, House of Usher, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Intruder, The Raven, The Terror, The Masque of Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Bloody Mama and many more. As a producer he was behind almost 500 films. Arguably among the most important filmmakers of the 20th century, Corman passed away at age 98. R.I.P.

William Friedkin has died

Born in Chicago, Friedkin accrued TV credits prior to his advance to the big screen as the director of Good TImes (1967), The Birthday Party (1968), The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970) before his major breakthrough, The French Connection (1971), for which he won his only Oscar. He followed it up with the even bigger smash, The Exorcist (1973), arguably the best horror film of all time, for which he was Oscar-nominated. Later credits include Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Rampage (1987), Rules of Engagement (2000), Killer Joe (2011) and The Devil and Father Amorth (2017, documentary). Friedkin passed away at age 87. R.I.P.

Louise Fletcher has passed away

Born in Alabama to deaf parents, Fletcher got her first credits in late-1950s TV-series.She took a 10 year-long sabbatical to devote her time to motherhood after the release of A Gathering of Eagles, but then came back and soon saw her career's most important part, as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which she won her sole Oscar. Later credits include Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), The Lucky Star (1980), Brainstorm (1983), Two Moon Junction (1988), Cruel Intentions (1999), A Perfect Man (2013) and many more. Fletcher passed away at age 88. R.I.P.

Jean-Luc Godard has passed away

Born in Paris, France, Godard lived much of his life in Switzerland. He wrote for French film criticism magazine Cahiers du Cinema and became foundational for the New French Wave that inspired new waves in scores of other countries across the world with his Breathless (1960). Later credits include A Woman Is A Woman (1961), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Le Petit Soldat (1962), Contempt (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Weekend (1967), Every Man for Himself (1980), King Lear (1987), Century of Cinema (1995, documentary), Goodbye to Language (2014) and many more. Godard died of assisted suicide at age 91. R.I.P.

Wolfgang Petersen has died

James Caan has died

Caan was born the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany in New York. He got his start on TV in the early 1960s. His credits include El Dorado (1966), The Rain People (1969), Brian's Song (1971, TV movie), The Godfather (1972), - for which he earned his only Oscar nomination, - Slither (1973), The Gambler (1974), Funny Lady (1975), Rollerball (1975), Silent Movie (1976), Hide in Plain Sight (1980), - the only film he also directed, - Thief (1981), Misery (1990), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Bottle Rocket (1996), Eraser (1996), Dogville (2003), Elf (2003), Las Vegas (2003-07), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and many more. Caan passed away at age 82. R.I.P.

Jean-Louis Trintignant has died

Born in Vaucluse, France, Trintignant's theatrical debut as an actor was in If All the Guys in the World... (1955). Later credits include ...And God Created Woman (1956), The Seven Deadly Sins (1961), Inferno (1964), A Man and A Woman (1966), My Love, My Love (1967), A Man to Kill (1967), The Great Silence (1968), Z (1969), The Assassination (1972), Three Colors: Red (1994), Amour (2012), Happy End (2017) and many more. He also wrote and directed two films in the 1970s. Trintignant passed away at age 91. R.I.P.

Ray Liotta has died

Adopted from an orphenage at a young age, Liotta got hooked on acting in high school. He had various TV credits in the late 1970s and early 80s, with his film debut in The Lonely Lady (1983). Later credits include Something Wild (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Goodfellas (1990), Cop Land (1997), Hannibal (2001), Blow (2001), Narc (2002), John Q (2002), Identity (2003), Observe and Report (2009), Youth in Revolt (2009), The Details (2011), Killing THem Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Shades of Blue (2016-18), The Simpsons (2018, TV-series), Marriage Story (2019), The Many Saints of Newark (2021), Black Bird (2022, TV-series) and many more. Liotta passed away at age 67 in his sleep while on production in the Dominican Republic. R.I.P.

Philip Baker Hall has died

Born in Ohio, Hall didn't start acting until he was 30. His long list of credits include Zabriskie Point (1970), Miami Vice (1987, TV-series), Midnight Run (1988), Ghostbusters II (1989), Cheers (1993, TV-series), Hard Eight (1996), The Rock (1996), Air Force One (1997), Boogie Nights (1997), Seinfeld (1991-98), Rush Hour (1998), The Insider (1999), Magnolia (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Bruce Almighty (2003), Dogville (2003), The Zodiac (2005), Zodiac (2007), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2004-09), Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011), Modern Family (2011-12) and many more. Hall passed away at age 90. R.I.P.

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11/01/2013

The Heat (2013) or, Prissy and Offensive in Boston

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