The Heat

“The Heat” begins with a scene possessing the ingredients to actually be interesting. A gaggle of male FBI agents have come up empty in their search of a suspect’s house. Then, Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) enters and immediately intuits the location of some drugs and the hiding spot of some guns. And like Kobe Bryant hitting one of his patented ridiculously angled twenty foot jump shots and then taunting everyone within a fifty foot radius, Ashburn lords her impeccable investigating skills over all her colleagues. She can do this job better and faster than an entire room of men and their obvious fury with her skills compared to theirs is palpable. But rather than making this the point of the scene – her skill set compared to theirs – the movie does pretty much what you’d expect to and brings it all back down to her relationship status. When Kobe gloats, he has hosannas penned in his honor about how he's “Doin' Work”. When Ashburn gloats, well hey, that's why she’s still single.

The potential for commentary on the ever-incendiary male/female workplace dynamic arises again and again, but alas, it’s not to be. Rather than give any real thought to its relationships and situations, “The Heat” is content to explore them by simply inserting two females into the overly-familiar framework of so many dude-centric buddy cop comedies of yore. “The Heat” is just “Lethal Weapon” with ladies, “The Other Girls.” And if Ashburn is the no-nonsense, primly-dressed, curse word-averse rule follower than the odds are 1-1 that her friend and foil will be strictly-nonsense, shaggily-dressed, curse word devotee rule breaker. And she is. Det. Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is the brash Boston cop whose beat becomes interlocked with Ashburn’s case involving…..uh……well…… “The Heat” is something of a paradox in so much as it seems entirely disinterested with its plot while simultaneously putting way too much time toward its plot.

It is directed by Paul Feig, a man who has a knack for staging gags and for letting his actresses rock the ad-lib to the extreme. To wit, McCarthy, who often takes her sweet time winding to the punchline in “The Heat” before, improbably, barreling right past that punchline and into another punchline, and one that’s usually fairly foul-mouthed. She has a ferocious comic energy here, one that actually compliments Bullock’s fastidiousness pretty well, and it’s why you wish that Feig and his writer Katie Dippold had any desire whatsoever to do something more with these characters. Instead Mullins is, more or less, a monster who has alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior, while Ashburn is her own kind of monster who has also alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior. They’re just a pair of do-it-their-own-way cops forced to work together and better understand the value of teamwork while learning a little bit about themselves in the process. And that just seems like such a colossal waste, unless you’re figuring in box office receipts in which case......yippee ki ay.

Feig is set to helm the all female “Ghostbusters”, a concept which doesn’t so much bother me because women have no right to wear the professional paranormal investigations and eliminations uniform as it does because of, well, “The Heat.” Plugging women into something that already exists in its own rigid way and simply having them copy of the moves of the dudes that came before seems like a wretched disservice. Wouldn’t be more interesting to tell new stories or, at the very least, to employ genre constrictions to subvert them rather than just saying, Hey, women can be in meandering, occasionally humorous buddy cop flicks too.

Spy

Although “Spy” emanates from the mind of Paul Feig its opening scenes evoke Nancy Meyers. Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), CIA bureaucrat in the vermin-infested offices of Langley, her desk covered in post-its like she’s an insurance adjustor at Allied, talks a suave Americanized version of 007, expositorily named Bradley Fine (Jude Law), through the paces at a glamorous locale. As he offs the bad guys of whom she keeps him expertly abreast, their dynamic falls into place. He ribs, she swoons, and when the mission ends and they have dinner, it becomes clear that she lusts for him though these feelings will never be reciprocated. It’s like she's Kate Winslet in “The Holiday” and he’s Rufus Sewell. But rather than house swapping and meeting a new man to unburden her emotions, Cooper’s vacation takes the form of a black-op, as she graduates from analyst to agent.

“Spy” turns on Cooper’s beloved Fine being murdered at the devious hands of Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), a Bulgarian villain with a beehive of hair and an icy superiority complex who knows the location of a superbad nuke that another superbad dude wants. Since Rayna knows the identity of all CIA operatives, Cooper is put in the field under increasingly stereotypical secret identities, like a companionless loser with ten cats. Rather than stick to the personas the CIA has engendered for her, however, Susan rebels, dressing how she wants, acting and saying what she wants, putting a brush to the easel of her self in the midst of a Spy Game and painting with abandon. Her BFF, Nancy, back at basecamp, played by Miranda Hart with miraculous comic timing, distills all of “Spy” down to its essence when she cries “I cannot condone your sexy but reckless actions!” They can’t, maybe, but we can.

The hook in these movies is typically that an agent has gone rogue or is playing by his/her own rules. Cooper, however, isn’t playing by her own rules so much as writing a whole new set of them as she goes. You might recall McCarthy’s previous vehicle “The Heat”, a film in which she and Sandra Bullock are a pair of star crossed cops made to prove themselves professionally to doubtful fellow officers. There is no such proving ground in “Spy.” Ridiculing such cinematic sexism are Cooper’s fellow male undercover cohorts, Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz), an Italian operative who seemingly treats every female’s body as his personal playground, and, even better, Rick Ford, a chauvinist blowhard played with gleeful relish by Jason Statham as a kind of funhouse mirror version of every other character he’s ever played. He’s vigilantly insistent on hanging around against orders to save the day, only to continually make a mess that Cooper has to clean up.

McCarthy's characters typically come intact from moment one going eighty-five in a sixty-five. Here, however, her character morphs from a decided timidity to her characteristic ferocity. That awakening is tied, wonderfully, weirdly, to her relationship with Rayna. The latter, surrounded by a gaggle of obligatorily incompetent henchmen, winds up employing the deep cover Cooper as her personal bodyguard, a plot twist that generally makes no sense schematically but works like gangbusters emotionally. Repartee in spy movies often is packed with debonair double entendres, yet the dialogue here is an avalanche of obscene insults, as if the two of them are bonding strictly by giving one another shit. They’re like a wicked feminist spin on the buddy cops who somehow get along even though they don’t, and their antagonistic give-and-take is how Cooper finds her secret agent woman sea legs. Her and Rayna's final moment on screen contains a couple curse words but also a couple smiles, like they both know they’ll never quite encounter such an impeccable foil again.

Rose Byrne effortlessly embodies drolly hilarious haughtiness, and Miranda Hart deftly accentuates every scene in which she appears, but the film is undoubtedly McCarthy’s. The stable of remarkable performers in “Spy” orbit entirely around her, and her performance carves out authenticity from absolute absurdity. “Spy” is a violent film, perhaps surprisingly so given its caricatural nature; yet, in a way, “Spy” treats violence more knowingly than any standard issue frowning somber action drama. When a knife goes through a hand, and it does, it’s not nothing-to-see-here, it’s holy-gods-I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened. Neither can Cooper, and that brings her down to our level.

One death is so grisly that Cooper instantly combusts into projectile vomit, the finest use of an otherwise outmoded gag I can recall. She barfs and then she gets right back to beating in people’s skulls and cracking wise. The film is exaggerated, she’s palpable, and together they sing in beautiful foulmouthed harmony.

Watching The Heat Solely Through Stills

They begin at odds.

They let their guard down.

They come closer together.

They bond.

They unite.