It was just a little over two years ago when a feature role in Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids instantly plucked Melissa McCarthy out of character actor obscurity and made her one of the most sought after comedic actors in the industry. McCarthy was a force of nature in that film, and she’s rightly seen a steady stream of work come her way ever since. Though the other big McCarthy-starring comedy of the summer, Seth Gordon’s Identity Thief, was an unfortunate disappointment, The Heat represents the first time McCarthy has teamed back up with Feig since Bridesmaids. So, how did they do? Eh, somewhere in the middle.
The Heat follows your typical buddy cop movie formula, wherein a loose cannon gets teamed up with a by-the-book stick in the mud, and though you think they’re never going to get along at first, over the course of a series of shared adventures they eventually become best friends. McCarthy, predictably, is our loose cannon, while Sandra Bullock has been recruited to play the role of the by-the-book stick in the mud. Why they team up or who they’re going after isn’t so important, because The Heat is an action comedy that focuses far more on the comedy than it does the action—to the point where the flimsy crime plot gets forgotten for big stretches of time so McCarthy and Bullock can just goof around and have fun together. Really, this didn’t need to be a buddy cop movie at all. You could have put McCarthy and Bullock in any situation, had them play the wildcard and the straight man, and you would have gotten the same results.
The screenplay’s inability to spin an engaging cop yarn doesn’t completely sink the movie though, because when you’ve got an actor as funny as McCarthy as one of your leads, putting all of the focus on quips and physical gags isn’t necessarily the worst strategy you can come up with. The Heat exists pretty much as a flimsy excuse to film her running her mouth and grandstanding, and as far as the running of the mouth and the grandstanding goes, she does not disappoint. Toward the end of the film she even creates a bit of a dramatic arc out of thin air, through sheer force of will and acting talent, as well. McCarthy has clearly got a depth of skills we’ve only seen hinted at to this point, so hopefully she gets the perfect project to show off what she can really do soon. Bullock, for her part, is certainly never going to be known as a great comedienne, but she’s always willing to make herself look silly and go all in for a gag, and she and McCarthy have an easy enough chemistry that her inclusion in the film generally works. Seeing The Heat shouldn’t be looked at as a priority by any means, but chances are those who stumble across it will more often than not come away from it not regretting the experience.
