The Heat

"The Heat" embraces a shock-and-awe style of comedy. Melissa McCarthy shows up early in the film loud and proud (and destructive). She is Agent Mullins, a neighborhood cop who is not afraid to sacrifice sugar for the stick, even to the point of throwing phone books at prisoners. I must confess I was terribly annoyed at first. I'm a fan of the f-word and think it's funny, and it can be concluded that most people take some sort of enjoyment from saying it. Say it right now--it feels almost liberating, doesn't it? At a dinner table, I think most people wouldn't mind the occasional f-word drop, but you would be distracted, annoyed, perhaps offended, and a little angry at the unoriginal repetitiveness of uttering such a world. And so many comedians, especially when they realize what kind of a dud their jokes are, resort to the word almost as a fail-safe. It almost always doesn't work. Here, that appears to be the case. McCarthy storms in and drops a dozen curse words. It's a bit shocking at first.

Pretty soon, though, the shock wares off and the awe sets in. I was soon laughing at virtually all of the wild antics of Sandra Bullock and McCarthy. There were probably just as many swear words but twice as many laughs. Mullins at one point mocks another character by saying, "You're giving me beauty advice? Do you even own a fucking mirror?" On paper, it's not much of a line, but it works well when she delivers it. She has a host of others, comparing her partner's breath to that of a dumpster and publicly ridiculing her police chief. She, and likely most of the audience, wonder why Bullock's character wears spanks to, she says, "keep it all together down there."

Paul Feig, director of "Bridesmaids," with a screenplay from Katie Dippold, has done an effective job at guiding the two leads. Bullock plays Agent Ashburn, an FBI agent who gets along with none of her colleagues yet desperately wants a promotion. Her director (Demian Bichir) isn't sure if a promotion is right for her, so he sends her to Boston to take down a drug cartel. It's not a particularly invigorating plot, but who cares? The twists are seen miles away, but much of the humor is not. I can undeniably state that a certain scene involving a man choking and a whole lot of grossness was one which I was not expecting (and one in which I think a majority of audience members turned their eyes away from). As the scene takes place more than an hour into the movie, it's a further reminder that we're in the awe part of the film (even though we are entirely shocked).

It's not simply Bullock and McCarthy who should get all the comedy credit. There are really funny people here and they are used well--they include Dan Bakkedahl, Tom Wilson, Michael McDonald, and Jane Curtain. They're so funny that I almost wished that the McCarthy/Bullock duo could have been downplayed a tad to give the other players a bit more room.  But these two are the stars and they deserve accolades. It reminds me of the famous Bechdel Test, which assesses whether or not women actually are a part of a movie. "Well, that's ridiculous! More propaganda about how women aren't visible in society...blah blah blah. Of course women are in movies!" But this simple test shows how flawed that argument is and how underrepresented women are in movies. It asks three questions: First, are there at least two women in the movie (who have names)? Second, do they talk to each other? And three, do they talk to each other about something other than a man? Now think about how many movies would actually pass this movie? My favorite film ("The Godfather") does not pass this movie. The movie recently named by Sight Sound to be the greatest of all time ("Vertigo") also does not pass. The Best Picture-winner "Argo"? Nope. What about any of the other nominees (which included "Amour," "Django Unchained," and "Lincoln")? No. Since the buddy-cop formula movies of the 1980s, there has never been a buddy-cop movie featuring female leads. It's nice to finally have a movie in which female characters are tougher and smarter (and funnier) than the male characters. And for the record, "The Heat" does technically pass this test, but just barely, as women are still outnumbered by men in the movie. But it's at least a step in the right direction.