117 lukewarm minutes
The Heat (15)
Running time 117 minutes ... but seems longer
Rating: *
Just to indicate that there is very little truly original in the world of film, try this question for size. What, apart from the temperature references, are the connections between the British comedy Hot Fuzz and the American comedy The Heat?
First, the story; both are about two accident-prone cops trying to defeat the good guys.
In The Heat, one cop is super efficient (played by Simon Pegg, think Hot Fuzz), together with Sandra Bullock. The other is fat, slobby and useless (Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz) and Melissa McCarthy in The Heat.
In a further similarity, the super cop is sent to the backwoods (English rural backwater in Hot Fuzz, Boston in The Heat) because they embarrass their colleagues and find themselves lumbered with a slob partner in an investigation.
The unlikely buddies team up, sort out their differences, defeat the baddies and emerge as heroes.
The differences of course are that Pegg and Frost are male in Hot Fuzz, while and Bullock and McCarthy of The Heat have plumbing of a different kind.
So, where does this leave the filmgoer? If you enjoyed Hot Fuzz, although maybe not as much as Shaun of the Dead, is recently-released The Heat up to the mark?
For me, the answer is sorry, but no. Sandra Bullock makes a fair job of reprising her previous role of good-cop-asked-to-do-silly-things-which-are-embarrassing as in Miss Congeniality. Ms McCarthy, on the other hand, swears a lot – and I mean A LOT.
Unusually for something billed as a comedy, there is a fair amount of violence – shooting, stabbing – in The Heat.
None of this though can give any hint as to why Sandra Bullock is in the movie at all, unless it is as a straight ‘feed’ to Melissa McCarthy’s jokes (The one about searching her boss’s office, looking for two small parts of his male anatomy she alleges he has lost was amusing at first, but went on too long.)
Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) appears to try to keep the show on the road by importing a crowd of minor lunatics to play bit parts, but in the end, you have the feeling that if and when the assorted assassins find the cops and their maniac friends and relations, they would do us all a favour by dispatching the lot of them and ending the film early.
That doesn’t happen, of course, and instead there dawns the awful feeling that, in the way of Hollywood today, The Heat 2 (suitable title ‘Re-Heat’?) is already on its way.