Film review: The Heat
Since May, Melissa McCarthy has appeared in three films. All of them have been terrible and full of the cheapest kinds of laughs. But while the other two – Identity Thief and The Hangover Part III – arguably did not pair her with big-name actors, her latest film, The Heat, has cast her alongside Sandra Bullock, an Oscar-winning actress.
Bullock, whose career path has been volatile, to say the least, plays the role of the nerdy, by-the-book FBI agent Sarah Ashburn. She is desperately looking for a promotion at work, as she is obviously very skilled at her job (in the film’s opening scene, she finds drugs that the sniffer dogs can’t even locate), and to prove her mettle she gets posted to Boston, where she has to look into a drug matter involving the mysterious figure called Larkin.
It doesn’t take much time before she clashes with local policewoman Shannon Mullins (McCarthy), who is obnoxious, vulgar and offensive. She is also very fat, which the film, like the makers of Identity Thief, expects us to see as a goldmine for comedy, especially in one of her first scenes, in which she parks her car in a tight space between other police cars and proceeds to slide, very ungracefully, through the adjacent vehicle’s open windows to finally get out. How she gets back in is never shown, of course.
To the filmmaker’s credit, perhaps, both women are demeaned in equal measure, but making fun of the two principal leads results in a very shallow film indeed when the storyline is as predictable as this one.
For the full review, visit The Prague Post.
(Still of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in The Heat. Photo by Gemma La Mana – © 2013 – Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.)
