The single-minded devotion that Ashburn and Mullins commit to their policing has kept them from being part of a family (even the extended police family), which is why they form their own via their unexpected you-complete-me friendship. Ashburn is particularly isolated interpersonally, mostly because her always-right attitude and open disdain for anyone lacking her competence and knowledge drives everyone away from her, which means Bullock is essentially playing a variation of the type-A corporate workhorse she played in The Proposal (2009), complete with yet-to-be-revealed soft spots relating to her sad background. Bullock excels at playing these characters because she tweaks their narcissism and tunnel-vision drive with little bits of awkwardness and vulnerability that make them resolutely human; the humor is in the chinks in her armor. In The Heat, Ashburn’s loneliness is exemplified in her spending Friday night watching TV while clinging tightly not to her own cat, but to the neighbor’s whom she constantly “borrows.”

Mullins, on the other hand, has a family, one of those clamoring Boston-Irish broods whose volume starts at loud and angry and goes up from there, but they can’t stand her because she put her own brother (Michael Rapaport) in prison for drugs. Her reasoning was that it was the only way to save him from a life on the street, a sentiment that her family rejects and Ashburn, unable to control her incessant need to supply unwanted information, undermines by reminding her that many people wind up junkies in prison. Rather than hanging onto someone else’s cat, Mullins spends her time throwing back beers at a seedy bar populated by graying has-beens, and like Ashburn she clashes with all the men with whom she works (a running joke involves her police captain, played by Tom Wilson, who is genuinely terrified of her and has prematurely aged just by working with her).

The pairing of Bullock (an Oscar winner with a long resume dating backing to the early ’90s) and McCarthy (an Oscar nominee who has exploded onto the scene in the past few years) is a high concept in and of itself, and The Heat would fizzle if it didn’t make the most of their on-screen potential. Their physical and interpersonal disparity is in the lineage of Laurel and Hardy, and they play it for all it’s worth; in the movie’s best moments you can sense them responding to each other and adjusting accordingly. It’s fun watching the delicate art of on-screen chemistry in such a resolutely indelicate movie. The screenplay by Katie Dippold, a veteran of Parks and Recreation and Mad TV, provides a rote, but sturdy police procedural to guide the laughs, although it’s hard to imagine that virtually every line wasn’t ad-libbed during production (watching McCarthy tear through every possible iteration of her dialogue in Judd Apatow’s This is 40 during the end credits was that movie’s most enjoyable few minutes). McCarthy delivers her profanity-laced lines with a tossed-off force that feels amazingly natural, and her put-downs and insults derive a particularly strong comic vibe by bouncing off Bullock’s pinched straight-woman routine, which at this point she has down to an art.

Director Paul Feig, who scored a major hit two years ago with Bridesmaids (2011), the film that launched McCarthy into instant stardom, isn’t a great stylist, but he knows on-screen talent and how to step back and let his lead actresses run the show. It’s little surprise, then, that virtually none of the male characters have any impact whatsoever, whether it be Marlon Wayans’ FBI agent, or Dan Bakkedahl as a pasty DEA agent competing with Ashburn and Mullins (he exists largely for McCarthy to spout off albino jokes). The only exception is newcomer Spoken Reasons as Rojas, a low-level drug dealer that Mullins pursues and catches early in the film and who shows up later to dispense some important information while be dangled from a balcony.

Unfortunately, Feig tends to err in favor of too much sometimes (a minor problem in Bridesmaids, as well), and there are a number of scenes in The Heat that feel largely unnecessary, even if they generate laughs, particularly a sequence in which Ashburn attempts to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a choking Denny’s diner to extremely bloody results. There is a narrative point (she finally realizes that her knowledge won’t always carry the day), but it feels like more than is needed—comedic overkill. However, the movie is good enough to carry that extra weight, although I imagine that repeat viewings at home will tempt some to hit the fast-forward button a few times.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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