What is this, Training Day?

The Heat

(2013)

I suppose it’s good and all to get a female buddy cop movie, one that turns out to be a big hit, as studios continue to slowly recognise there’s an eager demographic they haven’t been catering for. Except that it’s not so good when that movie is as tiresome as The Heat. Sure, it’s nothing new for the genre to coast on star appeal rather than anything approaching a robust and well-written script with gags that are other than improvised (or ticking all the gross out boxes that are so “Dawn of Apatow”, but really post-Farrellys). But is that really a worthy goal? Was anyone really satisfied with this, lazily relying on the resurging cachet of Sandy Buttocks and Melissa McCarthy’s see-her-in-anything window? Director Paul Feig certainly shouldn’t be, since it’s a massive step down from his movie-career making and McCarthy’s star making Bridesmaids.

The broad genre-plundering comedy often comes unstuck, refraining from Naked Gun-esque wholesale self-consciousness but settling instead on threadbare plots and fancy dress. Murphy’s first couple of cop outings succeeded because they threw his persona into vaguely plausible surroundings. The alternative is to play it large, which often means just going for lazy shit; see Police Academy. The Heat has far more in common with that than even the broadest of recent entries in the genre (Rush Hour, for example). 21 Jump Street surfs similar territory of tonal largess, but is much more focussed in terms of targets and plotting (and much funnier).

It would be churlish to begrudge the leads this success. Bullock’s never had much in the way of quality control but, as nice as it is to see an actress into her 50s pulling audiences on star power alone, it has to be acknowledged that the main reason this did so well is McCarthy. Like any number of comedians (and comediennes) getting their first taste of big screen success, audiences currently can’t get enough of her. Let me rephrase that; US audiences currently can’t get enough of her. Yes, it’s the turbulent time some US comics have internationally. Both Bullock and McCarthy had another hit movie each last year. Sandy in the Oscar-nominated worldwide smash Gravity. McCarthy had Identity Thief, which was only really seen in the States. The Heat did okay internationally, but took significantly less than half its homegrown plunder. And, while it’s going swimmingly for McCarthy right now, it can’t be long before she has her Cable Guy moment. It’s inevitable. Feig clearly thinks she’s gold dust, as he’s lining up – yes – a spy spoof next. No doubt McCarthy will fart and belch and saying revolting things while making a virtue of lacking the average spy’s athleticism as she proves she really is a very good agent.

She comes up with some decent routines here, but there are more that miss the target. That’s inevitable when you have an improv-inclined director letting the camera run and run (Feig also makes a cameo). The plot is peanuts; McCarthy’s slobbish cop (but a good cop!) and Bullock’s anal FBI agent (but a good FBI agent!) team up for a comedy of differences in order to nail the nefarious drug lord. Inevitably they become best of chums. McCarthy stole the show in Bridesmaids (as wonderful as Kristen Wiig is in EVERYTHING), but part of that was a result of bringing her down-to-earth, salty rotundity to a proper character-based comedy. Here, she and Bullock are supported by the thinnest of crutches so the rest of the movie, on her part at least, is a lot of shouting and saying “Look at me!” even when it (frequently) isn’t adding anything.

The movie’s at its worst when it’s indulgent, not because it goes beyond taste boundaries but because it tries too hard to shock or offend or just plain doesn’t know when to shout cut. There’s a severed tongue protruding from a victim’s arse, a dance montage to Groove in the Heart that’s interminable (which may be the point, but it isn’t endearing), a tracheotomy that is textbook-mistaking gross-out for always funny. Likewise, there’s something distastefully desperate about attempts to eke laughs from the bad guy getting shot in the dick twice. At least Robocop had some context. And then there are the awful music montages, the lazy moviemaker’s first port of call. Unfortunately Bullock gets the worst line, their mission statement, dreadfully delivered (“We’re the fucking Heat!”)

McCarthy does have a string of good lines, but they don’t make a good movie. You can see from the extensive outtakes she’ll try anything, which is fair enough. It’s Feig’s job to make them coherent. So the best include “Who closes the door to take a shit?”, “Who’s your wife? A five pound bag of flour with a hole in it?” (if in doubt, come up with an obscure minority to offend; in this case albinos); “Are you okay? You look really pale”), “It’s cheese. Cheese doesn’t go bad”. And I enjoyed her taking down a drug dealer with a watermelon (“See? I told you you was a racist!”) I also kind of did like the stabbing in the leg (“I’ve got to put it back in!”), even if it qualifies as whoring for grossness.

A few of the supporting cast get a look in. Thomas F. Wilson (Biff Tannen) plays the overburdened, rather than shouty, police captain, and Dan Bakkedahl has fun as the albino cop. Tony Hale wishes he'd steered clear of hookers. Michael Rapaport is still getting work, it seems. There’s also a subdued Marlon Wayans on winning form (although take a look at the outtakes and you’ll quickly find yourself reconsidering his charms). You won’t care about the villains, or who their boss guy is, though. You wont even care when a terribly forced moment causes our buddies to fall out, only to make up five minutes later.

McCarthy clearly revels in this kind of mediocrity, and because of her “Don’t give a shit” attitude comes out of it fairly unaffected (other than the cumulative message not to go and see another of her crappy movies). It’s Sandy I feel for. She’s such a good sport, and strolls through all the crudity and obscene language like a trooper, but it isn’t really her thing. Not that she needs to go off and purify herself with a romcom, but the effect isn’t so much one of mucking in as being dragged down to the level of Feig, McCarthy, et al. On the other hand, the prospect of McCarthy sharing a scene with Jason Statham (in the forthcoming Spy) just seems perfect. Of course, it will most likely also go on about 40 minutes longer than necessary.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog