Such a crazy life
Correspondent | Friday December 13, 2013 16:54
If you want a fast moving, yet light and silly entertainment it is worth watching. It is another cop duo comedy; this time set in Boston, Massachusetts, and filmed there over nine weeks starting in July 2012.
Sandra Bullock is great, as usual, but Melissa McCarthy practically, but not totally, steals the show from her.
The Heat has been nominated for the People’s Choice Award 2014 for Favourite Movie Duo. It has won a few awards for Choice Movie Chemistry and Choice Summer Movie Star to Sandra Bullock. It cost nearly P400,000,000 to make and has already grossed more than P3,000,000,000 worldwide. Movies certainly are big business.
Sarah Ashburn (played energetically by Sandra Bullock) is an upwardly mobile Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent out to make her mark and achieve recognition and a promotion. Her hotness and eagerness offends her co-workers in the FBI, as does her know-it-all arrogance. She has been sent to Boston to tackle and eliminate a network of hard-drug distribution and find the top dealer, Mr Larkin, who hides behind a false identity, ‘Rojas’, and not to settle for peanuts on the street. Faced with state and local rights she finds she has been assigned to work with a Boston detective, the vivacious and devious Shannon Mullins (acted by Melissa McCarthy).
They couldn’t be more different. Sarah plays by the book, because FBI agents must follow the rules and respect the law (that they really don’t, has been shown by the revelation that over the past decade agents have committed over 150 extra-judicial killings and not been held responsible for them). Sarah is clean, smooth, upright, proper, beautiful and well dressed with fine tastes.
Shannon will soon make mincemeat of her. Shannon is on the stout side (like our famous lady detective and Detective Kubu), has no respect for rules and regulations, as she has her own way of doing things. She doesn’t like another detective, especially from the FBI, moving into her territory. If Mr Larkin must be found, she will do it her way and get the credit. Shannon is foul-mouthed in complete contrast to Sarah’s essential properness. Sarah at one point even says to her, “Do you have to use that language?”
What begins as two detectives, hostile and competitive, is soon transformed into an aggressive duo out to get their prey. Who Larkin really is, is the surprise of the film. Along the way there are a lot of tense, yet funny situations.
A number of scenes stand out, like when Shannon strips off Sarah’s clothes, pointing out that she cannot dress the way she does because she stands out like a sore thumb (J. Edgar Hoover when head of the FBI set a dress code for his agents, and they always were recognisable … at college we used to greet them, welcome them and say if you want to talk to me, let me get a few friends to witness the conversation—both actions disgruntled them).
A lot of the humour is based on Shannon’s size, some of it a bit gross and unnecessary, like having her crash through a fence when Sarah can leap it, or Shannon’s parking her car in a space where she cannot get out of it. The uptight and prim Sarah will succumb to Shannon’s form of bonding through a prolonged and absurd episode of excessive drinking.
True respect for women and women’s liberation will not come through filming episodes that degrade women, and reinforce negative stereotypes in the eyes of men. This aspect of the film is accentuated through the excessive use of foul language derived from women’s body parts.
Do the producers really do this to make a chick-flick more acceptable to a wider audience? Or perhaps it is the prolonged sequence where Sarah and Shannon show off dance moves that may win the men over? No matter what, it is best to just sit back, mouth your popcorn, and in between bites, laugh.
It won’t be long before you recognise that no matter how different the two detectives are (Mutt and Jeff, Abbott and Costello) they both share some of the same challenges that will help to unite them into a dynamic duo after considerable bungling and mishaps. Neither of them is as ruthless as the drug lord they are after.
The Heat is two hours long. It is rated “R” or 16+ because of language, strong crude content and some violence. The script is by Katie Dippold and the movie is directed by Paul Feig (who worked with Melissa McCarthy on Bridesmaids).
The cinematographer is Robert Yeoman. The editors are Jay Deuby and Brent White. The music is by Mike Andrews.
sasa_majuma@yahoo.co.uk