The Heat

 A Partially Educated Review of The Heat

In which Sandra Bullock stars in a decent comedy and yet we are not in a parallel universe

Winning the Oscar for Best Actress can often be a curse. Natalie Portman followed her win with No Strings Attached and Your Highness. Halle Berry embarked on an odyssey of crap with Gothika, Catwoman and Perfect Stranger. Hilary Swank won twice, but has hardly capitalised on it and then there's Reese Witherspoon who, well, continued doing what Reese Witherspoon always does. Some irony then, that one of the people who has managed to survive is Sandra Bullock, who, prior to her win for The Blind Side, wasn't exactly known for the quality of her past work. While she may be getting most of her recent attention as a result of Gravity, she's also managed to transition back into comedy with The Heat. The miracle is that she's managed to find a genuinely decent one.

Bullock plays by-the-book FBI agent Sarah Ashburn, currently investigating mysterious drug kingpin Simon Larkin. Her investigation leads her to cross paths with Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy), who is anything but by-the-book. With both wanting to try and get the arrest of Larkin on their records, they find themselves having to help each other, leading to what is officially the fifteen millionth pairing of at-odds police officers in cinematic history. So, the plot's not really anything new, but this doesn't need to be a concern if the jokes are funny and, for the most part, they are.

A common, and often valid, complaint with modern comedies is that they're too long, commonly referred to as "Judd Apatow syndrome" or "James Boothman reviews syndrome". It's become even more of a problem in the last few years with comedies averaging nearer 2 hours, when a lot could do with a good half hour shaving from that (if not more). Another problem, specific to buddy cop comedies, is that all the funny bits come from conflict between the two of them, meaning that if or when that conflict disappears, so too do the competent jokes. It has to be said that The Heat comes as close to avoiding both of those hazards as you could hope. Ashburn and Mullins are oddities and this is used to emphasise the comedy. Any bonds they form aren't through a mentality of there being anything wrong with being an oddity, but instead through a mutual respect for each other's quirkier aspects. As a result, laughs are able to be evenly produced through both conflict and friendship, but instead of being in a mean-spirited "let's laugh at the freaks" kind of way, it comes more from sympathetic embarrassment on the audience's part.

It's also willing to change things up a little bit. The major difference is that, instead of displaying the usual ineptitude, both Ashburn and Mullins are good at their jobs and get their results. They're failing to proceed up the ladder due to various circumstances. Ashburn, while staunchly professional, is arrogant and physically incapable of working with anyone else. Mullins, on the other hand, has some interesting methods to get her results including, but not limited to, playing Russian Roulette with a male suspect's unmentionables. You may be expecting the feminist card to get played, but it's actually rarely pulled. Any grievances that their male counterparts have with them are, for the most part, justified, but their problems lie in the fact that it blinds them to the positives that both characters have. It would have been nice to see a few more well-rounded characters than just the two of them and pretty much all of the male characters feel like stock. However, let's not try and pretend it's the men who are usually getting the short straw when it comes to decent parts in films.

With the presence of both McCarthy and director Paul Feig, standards are set high as a direct result of their involvement in Bridesmaids, regardless of my own opinions on that film (it's overrated). However, to compare the two seems moderately pointless to me as the only real similarity between them is that they're both comedies and, on that basis, you might as well start comparing it to Scary Movie 5. If you liked Bridesmaids, you may like The Heat just as much, you may hate it or, if you're weird like me, you may think it's better. For me, the scale of recent cop comedies has 21 Jump Street at the top and The Other Guys way, way down at the bottom. 21 Jump Street made me literally laugh till it hurt and The Heat doesn't quite reach that level, but it comes closer than any other recent release that I can think of.

FOUR out of five