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'the heat': broads in blue, kicking buddy-cop behind.

Joel Arnold

Sandra Bullock (left) plays an FBI special agent whose usual composure gets ruffled when she's paired with a Boston cop (Melissa McCarthy) with little patience for procedure. Gemma La Mana/Fox hide caption

Sandra Bullock (left) plays an FBI special agent whose usual composure gets ruffled when she's paired with a Boston cop (Melissa McCarthy) with little patience for procedure.

Director: Paul Feig
Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime
Running Time: 117 minutes

Rated R for pervasive language, strong crude content and some violence

With: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demian Bichir

(Recommended)

In a summer movie season that's been light with women in major roles , a Melissa McCarthy-Sandra Bullock buddy-cop comedy sounds like a welcome change of pace. Add in the fact that this movie is Paul Feig's follow-up to Bridesmaids , and you have something especially interesting.

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'And You Will Be Patient?'

Credit: Fox

'I Think You And I Got Off On The Wrong Foot'

'The Rat's Back In The House'

Well, not to overstate things, but every other comedy this summer had better watch out. Because The Heat ? Is on.

Paying homage to its genre roots, The Heat opens with a bouncy '70s-cop-show credit sequence, and follows it by twice mastering the vanishing art of the efficient character introduction; in just a few short minutes, it proves itself as deft as even the likes of Lethal Weapon at nailing down exactly who these two wildly different characters are.

Bullock plays FBI agent Sarah Ashburn, a straitlaced professional who schools every other agent at the scene of a drug bust, and is the only one surprised when her boss (Demian Bichir) delays a possible promotion, pointing out that basically no one likes her. Good at her job to the point of arrogance, Ashburn needs to prove she can play well with others, so she's sent to Boston to work a case involving a drug cartel run by a shadowy figure known only as Larkin.

McCarthy's introduction as Boston detective Shannon Mullins is bigger and louder, involves both the unorthodox arrest of a john (Tony Hale, one of quite a few comedic talents in the movie) and the pursuit of a small-time dealer named Rojas (actor-comic Spoken Reasons), who's got a possible connection to Larkin. There's a manic joy in Mullins' eye as she pursues Rojas in her junker of a car — while he runs from her on foot.

In short, while Ashburn takes pride in a by-the-book job, Mullins just loves catching bad guys — and she does it well, book be damned. You can imagine how much she enjoys learning that the FBI, in the tight-lipped person of Ashburn, is muscling in on her case.

That's that for the basic setup of the average odd-couple buddy-cop actioner, and The Heat follows the genre's basic formula from combustible conflict through mutual respect and on to eventual friendship — only it tops pretty much every beat in that familiar plot outline with memorably ludicrous gags.

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Paul feig: le geek, c'est chic.

Writer Katie Dippold doesn't rest on the broad strokes of Ashburn and Mullins' contrasting personalities, instead going further to mine how differently they dress, think and speak for comedy. (Ashburn more than once confuses Mullins for long-haired, bearded men, though given the cheerful slovenliness of McCarthy's characterization, it's an almost understandable mistake.)

The one thing they do share — a keen sense of competition — results in a surprising (and welcome) number of physical-comedy bits large and small; witness a scene in which they each try their own approach to interrogation, or the small moment where they both try to make it into a suspect's building at once.

McCarthy and Bullock's divergent comedy styles are so suited to their respective characters that they could easily expand a Heat franchise to star in their own solo vehicles. Unlike McCarthy's role in the forgettable Identity Thief earlier this year, Mullins allows McCarthy to confidently flex all of her weird comedy muscles, whether she's verbally emasculating her precinct captain or finding another reason to draw her gun. (Mullins might be the most reckless movie cop in recent memory when it comes to firearms.)

Bullock's style is more technical, but she's more than game to play, and their mutual generosity as performers makes for a gratifying chemistry that amplifies the already smartly written jokes. When McCarthy and Bullock start downing shots in an epic drinking sequence, remember that you're watching an Oscar nominee and an Oscar winner — and yes, they're performing at the top of their game.

The plot is structured to facilitate bits like these, and if the movie were merely a vehicle conceived to let its stars bicker, bond and kick endless quantities of ass, it would be enough. But The Heat goes above and beyond, managing to sneak in an emotional core. Mullins cares about protecting her neighborhood and family, including her brother Jason (Michael Rapaport), who's recently out of prison and may have another link to Larkin. And as Ashburn and Mullins increasingly encounter real danger in the pursuit of their target, Feig makes the challenge of balancing side-by-side sentiment and irreverence look easy.

If The Heat is about more than being a well-oiled delivery system for impressive and effective comedy, it's in part about what it means to be a good cop — including the question of how gender does or doesn't factor into that. The challenges of being a female Five-0 on a male-dominated force are implicit from the beginning, but they're made plainer still when Mullins and Ashburn encounter a rival pair of DEA agents, one apparently harmless but the other a blatant sexist who wants the ladies off the case.

Spoiler alert: It doesn't happen. The Heat come, they conquer, and they leave you laughing. (Recommended)

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The Heat Reviews

The Heat is a breath of fresh air for what the film brings to the buddy cop comedy genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2023

Bawdy, R-rated, and the racial jokes run rampant. Doubtful it could have been made in today's sensitive climate, but it should have been a new franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 26, 2022

If Hot Fuzz is the gold standard for recent buddy-cop movies and The Other Guys is the silver, then The Heat is the bronze.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 17, 2021

The Heat may not set the box-office ablaze it should be packing more than enough heat to justify that rumored sequel.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 10, 2020

Go see "The Heat" and laugh your ass off. It won't change the world, but you will bust a gut watching it.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 8, 2020

They didn't have to resort to the superficial jokes because there was a character that they had thought through behind it.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2020

It was refreshing.

The Heat is occasionally hilarious yet predictable, supported by the combined comedic skills of [Sandra] Bullock and [Melissa] McCarthy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 21, 2019

Rather than transcend the source material here, The Heat pads out worn clichés with funny one-liners and gross-out gags.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2019

There are some sharp, observational touches behind the antic comedy. And during the lulls in the action there are some sensitive time-outs between the co-stars that almost feel they belong in another movie.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2019

The main appeal here is clearly the two leads, and indeed Bullock and McCarthy are a comedic dream team.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 8, 2019

There's a distinctive feeling that we are watching jokes as they are being constructed. Feig is liable to let the camera just run as McCarthy fires off a dozen lines on a topic, causing the jokes to feel badly strung out.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 26, 2019

It's refreshing to see female characters who do not spend large portions of their conversations together talking about men and relationships. A little over-the-top at times, these women still do a respectable job.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2018

So amid this wildly predictable mess of a plot, there are several almost redeeming moments of comedy.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 6, 2018

This is a disappointment as, ultimately, the stars' chemistry just can't see off the lazy, sloppy formulaic execution.

Full Review | Sep 5, 2018

The plot is formulaic, the stereotypes awful, the villain limp and sniffling and the message beyond predictable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 9, 2018

The Heat plays with clichés from a long line of mismatched buddy cop comedies, and it's as good as any in the genre's pantheon.

Full Review | Aug 9, 2017

In the cinematic world of worthwhile cop partnerships, The Heat is just an addled rookie.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Aug 8, 2016

It takes a special kind of film to evoke uproarious laughter from the sight of Sandra Bullock being repeatedly stabbed in the leg, but "The Heat" does exactly that.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2016

Ms. Bullock as the aggressive brute and Ms. McCarthy as the straitlaced go-getter would have challenged these easy stereotypes and made them a tad less insulting to successful career women everywhere.

Full Review | Oct 8, 2015

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Common sense media reviewers.

Female buddy-cop comedy mixes humor, violence, drinking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Amid the violence and crude content is the idea th

At first, neither of the main characters seems lik

Much of the violent content is presented with a co

Plenty of sexual references. One of the main chara

One of the main characters is extremely profane, p

Some products are visible on screen, including peo

Some scenes show people drinking in bars, includin

Positive Messages

Amid the violence and crude content is the idea that friendship and loyalty are important, especially among law enforcement officers who put their lives in danger and must depend on each other. The two main characters are initially quite hostile, but they eventually learn to trust each other.

Positive Role Models

At first, neither of the main characters seems like a positive role model: They're unfriendly, condescending, and hostile to just about everyone around them -- and even worse to each other. But eventually, they start to bond with each other, and their friction becomes a strong bond of loyalty. They also slowly reveal the events in their past that led to them having such tough exteriors, and, in the process, they begin to come out of those shells. They end up being great friends who are recognized for their good work. Many jokes are made at an albino character's expense.

Violence & Scariness

Much of the violent content is presented with a comedic tone, and it's not constant, but several scenes show a police officer beating up suspects, sometimes to subdue drug dealers attempting to avoid arrest and sometimes during interrogations when she hits suspects who are handcuffed and helpless, even threatening to shoot them. A gangster executes another man by shooting him in the head at close range. Crime scene photos show murder victims' dismembered corpses. Another criminal stabs a FBI agent and then slowly prepares to do much worse with a wicked assortment of knives. One scene shows blood all over a character's hands/forearms.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Plenty of sexual references. One of the main characters often discusses her history of brief sexual flings, while the other talks about her total lack of a romantic life. In one scene a woman kisses a man passionately but comedically. Another scene involves a cop trying to seduce a perp by dressing sexy and throwing her body against his. One brief sequence shows her in her bra while getting drunk at a bar.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

One of the main characters is extremely profane, punctuating nearly every sentence with all manner of swear words, including "s--t," "f--k," "d--k," "ass," "t-ts," "a--hole," "hell," "damn," "crap," "oh my God," "goddamn," and more. The other character is the exact opposite, unable to utter even the mildest curse words ... until the last section of the film, when she undergoes something of a character transformation that has a significant impact upon her vocabulary. A character uses the word "retarded" to insult someone's intellect. There are also jokes about albinism.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Some products are visible on screen, including people drinking Coke, using a BlackBerry, and driving a Chevrolet or Volvo.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some scenes show people drinking in bars, including one extended sequence involving two women who drink several shots, followed by numerous beers and other drinks during an all-night bender that shows them getting completely wasted. Some characters smoke cigarettes, and others smoke joints. The plot of the film features two officers attempting to bring down a drug lord, so there are many scenes showing mid-level dealers and their wares.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Heat stars Sandra Bullock as an uptight FBI agent who's forced to team up with an irritating Boston cop played by Melissa McCarthy to take down a mysterious drug lord. In this mismatched-buddy comedy directed by Bridesmaids ' Paul Feig, the duo must learn to work as a team despite their initial distrust and hostility. But messages about friendship and loyalty come with a heaping serving of crude, violent content, including sexual references, a cop beating helpless suspects, an execution, photos of dismembered bodies, and more. There's also tons of swearing ("s--t," "f--k," and more), as well as scenes with drug use (pot) and very heavy drinking. A character uses the word "retarded" to insult someone's intellect and there are jokes about albinism. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (22)
Kids say (61)

Based on 22 parent reviews

Funny, profane comedy has strong female leads

What's the story.

Sarah Ashburn ( Sandra Bullock ) is an effective FBI agent who irritates everyone around her. Shannon Mullins ( Melissa McCarthy ) is a Boston cop who's angry at everyone around her. Together, they make a truly terrible team, but they're forced to work together to take down a mysterious drug lord. That is, if they can avoid killing each other first in THE HEAT, from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig.

Is It Any Good?

The Heat takes a typically male genre -- the buddy-cop action movie -- and turns it on its head, serving up a hilarious, if predictable, contribution to the genre. The film's best assets are its leads, who share an easy, believable rapport, even if they're very different.

What's groundbreaking here is that the differences between the two main characters aren't the obvious ones -- don't expect any low blows about McCarthy's weight or the usual NYC-versus-Boston rivalry. Instead, Ashburn and Mullins are allowed complexities unique to them, so they're interesting. Don't expect the crime detection part to be anything more than paint-by-numbers. But since The Heat gives us the fantastic duo that is Bullock and McCarthy, we'll cut it some slack.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether the main characters seem realistic. Are they caricatures? Does it make sense that they would eventually become devoted friends?

How do Ashburn and Mullins compare to the cop duos in other classic films? Does it make much difference that they're both female?

How does the movie portray drinking and drug use? Are there realistic consequences? Do you think there have to be in a comedy aimed at older teens and adults?

How does the violence in this movie compare to what you might see in movies more focused on action than comedy? Does the movie's tone change the impact of the content?

Movie Details

In theaters : June 28, 2013
On DVD or streaming : October 15, 2013
Cast : Melissa McCarthy , Sandra Bullock , Tony Hale
Director : Paul Feig
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
Genre : Comedy
Topics : Friendship
Run time : 117 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : pervasive language, strong crude content and some violence
Last updated : May 22, 2024

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The Heat (I) (2013)

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Film Review: ‘The Heat’

Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play a reluctant buddy-cop pair in an R-rated comedy that sacrifices action for consistent laughs.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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They don’t get along onscreen, but Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy have a field day in “The Heat .” While the title refers to the reluctant buddy -cop pair, it may just as well describe the packaging philosophy behind this R-rated comedy: Grab director Paul Feig as “Bridesmaids” breaks B.O. records, give him an on-fire spec script from ex-“Conan” intern Katie Dippold and attach two Oscar-forged stars, Bullock hot off her “ The Blind Side ” win and McCarthy about to be nominated. With elements like these, the pic’s shoot-first, fix-it-later approach sacrifices action for consistent laughs, delivering on the front that should make “ The Heat ” a hit.

Dippold’s script is hardly the first distaff-driven comedy to demonstrate that a pair of lady cops can hold their own in a notoriously testosterone-heavy field — with all due respect to Ginger Rogers, this duo accomplishes everything the guys can, backward and in tactical boots. From “Feds” to “D.E.B.S.,” it’s well-trod territory, and yet, the key to Feig’s approach comes in embracing the lesson of “Bridesmaids”: namely, that female comedies needn’t be dainty, but can get just as raunchy as their Y-chromosome counterparts, even without Judd Apatow attached.

Popular on Variety

Feig, who got his big break creating “ Freaks and Geeks ” 13 years back, no doubt owes much of his approach to Apatow, his fellow “Geeks” exec producer. It certainly shows in the improv-heavy film’s tendency to run longer than the material demands, as well as the generally shaggy way the funniest subplots get the most screentime (how many sports-themed Jesus paintings can one pic support?), while others dead-end entirely: Despite great lengths taken to bug a criminal’s cell phone, the two cops never bother to listen in on his calls.

Breaking it down, “The Heat” has been engineered to deliver the laughs, and the result certainly does, despite coming alarmingly near to botching the procedural elements along the way. The bumpy car chases, police interrogations and heavy-artillery standoffs work only insofar as Feig can rely on humor to steal the scene. Lucky for him, he had two editors to assemble a sometimes-uneven cut that puts the funny forward, and two gifted comedic actresses in Bullock and McCarthy to back him up.

Resurrecting a fair amount of her “Miss Congeniality” persona, Bullock plays Sarah Ashburn, a socially awkward FBI agent angling for a promotion. There’s no clumsiness here, however: Ashburn is aces at her job, just totally devoid of people skills. Assigned to bring down a Boston drug lord, she immediately steps on the toes of the top cop on the local beat, a Dirty Harry type named Shannon Mullins (McCarthy) whose track record evidently excuses her own equally abrasive style. Naturally, these two incompatible personalities will have to work together to crack the case.

For better or worse, the mismatched chemistry clearly extends behind the scenes as well. Whereas McCarthy flourishes in an ad lib-friendly environment, Bullock is stuck playing straight woman. It’s impossible to forget that Bullock is merely pretending to be unlikable and robotic, as if the filmmakers had a stern, Clarice Starling-style character in mind, where she easily could have played a charismatic desk jockey who simply wasn’t accustomed to field work. By contrast, McCarthy easily disappears into her role, to the extent that it’s tricky to distinguish where Mullins’ personality ends and the actress’s begins.

Where another script might have treated the gender dynamic strictly as subtext, Dippold grapples the issue head-on, conceiving multiple scenes in which Ashburn and Mullins must justify themselves to a hostile, all-male workplace. In stakeout mode, they quickly run afoul of two misogynist DEA agents (Dan Bakkedahl and Taran Killam ), whose insults are trumped by the fact that one of them is albino — perhaps the last minority unprotected by political correctness. Mullins doesn’t take guff from anyone. In the office, she retaliates against an unsupportive boss by conducting a hilarious, humiliating search for his missing “mouse balls.” And whenever shots are fired, chances are she’s aiming for the perp’s crotch.

In addition to emasculating the standard buddy-cop cliches, the film goes out of its way to de-objectify its two stars, never stooping to that tacky slow-pan trick where the camera ogles the characters from the ground up while pole-dancing music sets the tone. In fact, when it comes to the soundtrack, music supervisor Randall Poster has assembled a lineup of funky, high-attitude hip-hop tracks, nearly all of them performed by women. By emphasizing both the humor and the empowerment aspects of the picture, “The Heat” easily overcomes the occasional clunkiness along the way.

Reviewed at Fox Studios, Los Angeles, June 25, 2013. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 117 MIN.

Production: A 20th Century Fox presentation of a Chernin Entertainment production made in association with TSG Entertainment, Ingenious Media. Produced by Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping. Executive producers, Paul Feig, Michele Imperato Stabile, Dylan Clark. Co-producer, Jessie Henderson.
Crew: Directed by Paul Feig. Screenplay, Katie Dippold. Camera (Deluxe color), Robert Yeoman; editors, Brent White, Jay Deuby; music, Mike Andrews; music supervisor, Randall Poster; production designer, Jefferson Sage; art director, E. David Cosier; set decorator, Kyra Curcio; costume designer, Catherine Marie Thomas; sound (Dolby/Datasat/SDDS), Ken McLaughlin; supervising sound editor, Andrew DeCristofaro; re-recording mixers, Marc Fishman, Christian P. Minkler; visual effects producer, Tom Ford; visual effects, Brainstorm Digital, Furious FX; stunt coordinator, Jeff Gibson; assistant director, Matt Rebenkoff; casting, Allison Jones.
With: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demian Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Michael Rapaport, Jane Curtin, Spoken Reasons, Dan Bakkedahl, Taran Killam, Michael McDonald, Tom Wilson. (English, Bulgarian dialogue)

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The heat: film review.

Paul Feig's comedy stars Sandra Bullock as an uptight FBI agent and Melissa McCarthy as a crass Boston street cop.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The Heat Bullock McCarthy on Ground - H 2013

“Do you have to use that language?” Sandra Bullock ‘ s uptight FBI agent complains after hearing one too many scatological blasts from the potty mouth of Melissa McCarthy ‘s Boston street cop. Well, hell, of course she does, or there wouldn’t be much life in The Heat , an obediently formulaic hostile-buddy comedy that achieves all its mirthful mileage from the abrasively combative relationship between the two competitive women. The script’s simpleminded shenanigans notwithstanding, the two stars sync up better than their characters do, especially with some rough-and-tumble physical slapstick, resulting in a crude, low-brow audience-pleaser that will hit the funny bones of both performers’ fan bases and gain additional commercial traction as the most female-centric release of the summer.

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Movie Review: Rub Two Styles of Comedy Together and You Get the Profane, Hilarious The Heat

The odd couple at the center of The Heat isn’t just uptight Sandra Bullock and uncouth Melissa McCarthy; it’s also two different styles of comedy. Bullock has played a cop several times before, and she’s played a straight-laced workaholic before, too. But she’s never quite done the improv-style, go-for-broke brand of comedy perfected by the Apatow Brigade and shows like The Office . McCarthy has come into her own in recent years thanks to precisely this style of anything-goes humor. We know our mismatched heroines will eventually find a way to work together and become besties. But will the two mismatched comic genres?

Maybe. The Heat is kind of a mess, but it’s a funny mess. Bullock plays Ashburn, a highly competent, by-the-books FBI agent with no life. (Her only company is a cat — her neighbor’s.) McCarthy is Mullins, the vulgar loose cannon Boston detective whom Ashburn has to work with in order to apprehend a brutal drug kingpin. It’s no Beverly Hills Cop , but The Heat does spend a decent amount of time with its cops ‘n robbers plot — bizarre, because it’s such a nothing story. So, the film sometimes feels lax, disjointed, like it’s just wasting time until the next comic set piece rolls around. The good news is that said set piece usually does roll around. And when it’s on, The Heat is on. (God, did I just say that?)

Actually, the banter between Ashburn and Mullins, the ostensible highlight and selling point of the movie (watch Sandy the tightwad square off against Melissa the boor!) is less uproarious than just charmingly awkward, with the two repeatedly misunderstanding and stumbling over each other’s sentences. It’s chuckleworthy stuff, but that’s as far as it goes. The big laughs come, though, whenever our heroines have to interact with anyone else, as the oft-bewildered supporting cast ping-pongs between Ashburn’s neurotic daftness and Mullins’s hair-trigger lunacy. Burning especially bright are the scenes with the latter’s family, a collection of Southie-accented Massholes who look like they came straight from the blooper reel for The Fighter , and who launch into foul-mouthed tirades upon seeing their wayward offspring. (Mullins put one of them in jail, see.)

Director Paul Feig (who also made Bridesmaids ) isn’t much for pacing, but he’s a good gag man, and he knows his way around actors: Bullock is so good as the hapless nerd who tries to do everything right that it’s a wonder anyone ever tried to pass her off as America’s Sweetheart. And McCarthy, as always, is hard to resist. More than any other comic actor working today, she has the ability to make every word coming out of her lips feel like it’s being thought up on the spot rather than recited from memory. Every actor is supposed to do this, of course, but she does it better than most.

At its best, The Heat is profane, ludicrous, and violent, but it never feels gratuitous, for some reason. There’s even a fairly substantial body count — which ordinarily might work against a movie like this, as The Hangover Part III found out recently. But here, because the actual jokes around it are funny, the violence has the intended effect — to jar us and raise our pulses, because we laugh harder when we’re excited. To be fair, not all of it works as well as it should: An emergency tracheotomy scene (don’t ask) feels like a random attempt to mimic the cringing body horror of Bridesmaids , and the repeated gags about Dan Bakkedahl’s albino rival cop (“You look evil as shit!” Mullins exclaims upon seeing him) lose their kick after a while. But the cast is good, the jokes are mostly funny, and whenever it starts to wear out its welcome, The Heat pulls out another decent gag to keep things moving. I look forward to half-watching it again on cable one day.

movie review
melissa mccarthy
sandra bullock

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There is a sequence at the center of Michael Mann's "Heat" that illuminates the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna ( Al Pacino ) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley ( Robert De Niro ) for days. McCauley is smart and wary and seems impossible to trap. So, one evening, tailing McCauley's car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.

McCauley carefully shifts the loaded gun he is carrying. He waits in his car. Hanna approaches it and says, "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?" McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.

The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.

McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a 'Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't. The conversation comes to an end. The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.

They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.

The movie's other subject is the women. Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice ( Diane Venora ), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis ( Val Kilmer ), whose wife is Charlene ( Ashley Judd ).

McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady ( Amy Brenneman ), who asks him a lot of questions. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely. "I am alone," he tells her. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her.

This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.

McCauley is the mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next move.

The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in the same place, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly have had in mind. No target is anywhere in view. Suddenly Hanna gets it: "You know what they're looking at? They're looking at us - the LAPD. We just got made." He is right. McCauley is now on a roof looking at them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.

De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.

What is interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino's wife, played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She is married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter, rebellious and screwed up, is getting no fathering from him. Their marriage is a joke, and when he catches her with another man, she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.

The other women, played by Judd and Brenneman, are not quite so insightful. They still have some delusions, although Brenneman, who plays a graphic artist, balks as any modern woman would when this strange, secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and her computer and follow him to uncertainty in New Zealand.

Michael Mann's writing and direction elevate this material.

It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate - to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Heat (1995)

Rated R For Violence and Language

174 minutes

Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley

Jon Voight as Nate

Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna

Val Kilmer as Chris Shiherlis

Produced, Written and Directed by

Michael Mann

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Twenty-Five Years Later, ‘Heat’ Is Still the Juice

A meeting of two legends, an iconic ode to L.A., and a perfect heist thriller

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There is a moment in Heat that’s been living rent-free in my head for 25 years. It’s not one of the famous ones, of which there are plenty. Think of the opening glimpse of an urban rail train slowly coming into focus through plumes of smoke, its approaching headlights holding the audience in thrall. Or the closing tableau of Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna standing victorious (or is he?) over the body of his professional nemesis and spiritual sibling Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), as the city flickers indifferently in the distance.

But the image I’m thinking of comes in the chaos of the brutal mid-film shoot-out between Vincent’s and Neil’s cops-and-robbers crews—a 10-minute set piece that’s like an entire action movie in miniature, exploding all of Heat ’s simmering tensions in a hail of semiautomatic gunfire. Acting on a tip from one of their quarry’s disgruntled ex-confederates, Vincent and his LAPD robbery/homicide squad members ambush Neil’s team during a daring daylight bank robbery. As the bullets start flying, Vincent’s partner Bosko (Ted Levine) is hit and falls to the ground. Rushing toward the body, Vincent looks down and we get a shot of Levine lying prone and staring, his green eyes wild and frozen in sightless surprise. Vincent moves on, but a question lingers: How did a man who knew exactly what he was signing up for not see it coming?

Like no other Hollywood filmmaker of his vintage, Michael Mann is entrenched as an existentialist. The life-and-death stakes in his films are partially a by-product of the crime movie genre, with its lethal rituals of violence and reprisal. But in lieu of weightless escapism, the Chicago-born director pursues a sense of gravitas that bypasses melodrama for something more ephemeral. At his best—and a case can be made that Heat is Mann at his best—Mann’s movies feel cosmic. If Mann’s great theme is compulsion to live dangerously, he’s hardly shy about contemplating the consequences.

Mann is serious, but he’s also a show-off. One reason that he’s been so canonized by academics and auteurists alike is that his muscular-yet-mystical storytelling technique—relentless forward momentum punctuated by philosophical pauses—almost always calls attention to itself. Ditto the director’s embrace of digital formats, which he has used not in service of seamless illusion, à la the invisible CGI suturing of David Fincher, but to deconstruct and reimagine the visual syntax of multiplex action movies. Heat was shot on crisp 35 mm film, and it’s a beautiful-looking movie, but its follow-ups have been suspended between clarity and murk; think of the neon rainbows of Collateral , or Miami Vice , with its screen-saver skies. That this aesthetic transition from calculated, classical slickness to a blurry immediacy hasn’t really changed the substance of Mann’s work speaks to the consistency of his world view. Whatever lens he’s looking through, he always sees the same things.

What Mann’s movies perceive most acutely is the dilemma of professionalism—a contradiction dating back to his 1981 feature debut, Thief . There, James Caan’s master safecracker tried to extricate himself from a life of crime despite his genius-level proficiency at its dark arts. Instead of imposing or inviting judgment on a character, Mann emphasized the inherent value of a job well done, and exalted his hero’s refusal to let his gifts be subordinated or exploited by gangsters whose brute-force operations are analogous to corporate capitalism. It’s no coincidence that the two most hateful characters in Heat are William Fichtner’s white-collar money launderer Roger Van Zant and Kevin Gage’s perverse serial killer Waingro, nor that they end up forging an unlikely alliance. Waingro’s explanation for wasting two helpless cops and compromising an otherwise precise heist—a mistake that sets the movie’s plot in motion—is “I had to get it on.” If there’s anything that Mann despises more than cynical expediency, it’s sloppiness.

De Niro’s performance in Heat is a model of composure—the title of the book we see him reading, Stress Fractures in Titanium , encapsulates his unflappability. Pacino is more voluble, operating in the same realm of borderline self-parody as The Devil’s Advocate but yoking his flamboyance smartly to the demands of the role. Whenever Vincent flies off the handle, it’s always shown to be purposeful—as the coping mechanism of a put-upon, possibly coked-up cop . Depending on the situation, Vincent is willing to go by the book or to throw it away. It’s no surprise that critics riding Mann’s wavelength, as well as detractors skeptical of his legend, are equally primed to size up his studies of weirdo, alpha-male ascetics—from FBI profilers ( Manhunter ), to boxers ( Ali ), to contract killers ( Collateral ), to freelance hackers ( Blackhat )—as distinct brush strokes in some collective painting of directorial self-portraiture.

The pathos in Mann’s movies—including and especially Heat —comes from the impossibility of reconciling individual excellence with conventional forms of security and fulfillment. This lone-wolf archetype gets effectively doubled in Heat , which was sold as an unprecedented summit of two ranking New Hollywood icons. The coffee date between Neil and Vincent— which, amazingly, was never rehearsed prior to shooting —is exactly as intense and enjoyable as you remember, heightened by Mann’s choice to cut exclusively between over-the-shoulder close-ups, as if the characters were reluctant to share the frame. The point of the scene, of course, is that Vincent and Neil are mirror images of one another, virtuoso workaholics in trades with life-or-death stakes. There’s a comic-book aspect to their rivalry, which may be why Christopher Nolan cribbed so much from Heat in his Batman movies. The difference is that where The Dark Knight strives to give its globally recognized icons a human dimension, Heat makes a couple of guys having a cup of coffee into myth.

Heat ’s pulpy grandeur stems not only from Mann’s characteristic formalism: his serene, lyrical establishing shots and his hyperbolic use of color to delineate psychological states. It’s also a testament to his instincts as a city filmmaker. With respect to Pacino and De Niro, if Heat deserved an acting Oscar, it would be for Los Angeles playing itself. Shooting in and around America’s most widely photographed city, Mann insisted on locations that had only rarely (or never) been used before. The result is a movie that evokes an entire history of L.A.-based procedurals without ever replicating them. If it’s possible for a film to feel simultaneously specific and nondescript, Heat ’s topography of lonely off-ramps, glowing industrial towers, and rusted metal shipping containers is like wasteland vérité. Even the most chic and luxurious spaces are made strange by Mann’s belief in a steely, unvarnished realism. When Vincent catches his wife, Justine (Diane Venora), cheating on him with a stranger named Ralph (Xander Berkeley), he’s seemingly less aggrieved by her infidelity than that he has to come home to her “ex-husband’s dead-tech, postmodernistic bullshit house” in order to deal with it.

“When do you finally want to buy furniture?” cracks Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) upon waking up broke and hungover on the floor in Neil’s spartan beachfront residence—a question that, like so much of the dialogue in Heat , pops the hood on the sequence’s subtexts about literal and figurative emptiness. “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner,” Neil tells his pal, a dictum that apparently extends to couches. (A shot of a gun being placed on a glass table quotes the Canadian painter Alex Colville’s 1967 masterpiece Pacific while indicating the extent of Neil’s material possessions.) The common denominator between Vincent and Neil is their commitment-phobic approach to personal relationships—their need to build themselves escape hatches.

But Chris, who’s played by Kilmer in a wonderfully weird performance that’s almost a parody of broodingly handsome fuck-ups, is defined by his devotion to his wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd). Heat surrounds both of its protagonists with figures who serve as liabilities to their respective enterprises—women and children, mostly, with Vincent growing ever more protective of his stepdaughter Lauren (Natalie Portman). Neil, meanwhile, is threatened not only by his emerging romance with Amy Brenneman’s Eady—a newcomer to L.A. who explains on a first date that graphic design is her passion—but also by Charlene through the proxy of Chris. There is a strange, troubling scene where Neil confronts Charlene about her extramarital affair and basically threatens her to stay with her compulsive-gambler husband until he’s completed one last big score or else. Even though we know De Niro is playing an antihero, there’s something unsettling about the character’s willingness to intimidate and instrumentalize the people around him that complicates his romantic self-conception as a lone wolf. It’s one thing to live by an ascetic, samurai-like code of self-preservation; it’s another to try to impose those standards on everybody else.

Heat ’s sprawling plot is filled with poetic coincidences, like having Waingro revealed as the serial killer Vincent has been trailing since long before the film begins; when Neil kills Waingro in retribution for screwing up his operation (and selling him out to Van Zant), he’s unknowingly doing his pursuer’s work for him (yet another of the script’s doubling motifs). The structure piles on tragedies, like the subplot about a sympathetic ex-con (Dennis Haysbert) whose recidivism gets him killed out of nowhere. By the time Vincent is rushing Lauren to the hospital after a suicide attempt, the three-hour running time feels more like a compressed minseries—which is actually true enough.

Mann originally wrote the script for Heat in 1979, integrating the experiences and anecdotes of a Chicago-based cop named Chuck Adamson. His 16-year odyssey to get the movie made suggests a deeply personal investment in the material. Mann’s 1989 television movie L.A. Takedown was conceived as a TV pilot for NBC following the success of Miami Vice. If you watch it now, you can see the narrative and thematic outlines of Heat: the Vincent-Neil rivalry, the laserlike focus on police procedure, the loose-cannon Waingro subplot (with the character played by Xander Berkeley), a big shoot-out that brings together all the different plot threads. What’s missing, though—besides a $60 million budget and two gigantic movie stars—is the grandiloquent passion of the movie version.

Nobody who loves Heat can deny that it’s pretentious. It’s very pretentious: For the final showdown between Pacino and De Niro, Mann uses Moby’s meditative, synth-driven “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters,” a title that expressly reflects the director’s metaphysical aspirations. The song competes for space on the soundtrack with the thundering of jets overhead as Neil and Vincent stalk each other one last time on the tarmac at LAX, a backdrop symbolizing departure and freedom—the latter paradoxically achieved by Neil going out on his own terms.

“Brother, you are going down,” Vincent had told Neil earlier in the diner. The greatness of Mann’s ending is that it fulfills the lethal part of Pacino’s prophecy while making us feel everything implied in that biblical word “brother.” Just because we can see the finale coming doesn’t make it any less devastating. The inevitability is part of the shock. The pretentiousness is the point. The action is the juice. The movie is the best.

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DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

June 28, 2013
Sandra Bullock as Ashburn; Melissa McCarthy as Mullins; Demián Bichir as Hale; Marlon Wayans as Levy; Michael Rapaport as Jason Mullins; Jane Curtin as Mrs. Mullins; Spoken Reasons as Rojas; Dan Bakkedahl as Craig; Taran Killam as Adam; Michael McDonald as Julian; Thomas F. Wilson as Captain Woods

Home Release Date

October 15, 2013

Distributor

20th Century Fox

Movie Review

Ashburn is an arrogant, ambitious hoity-toity FBI agent who doesn’t play well with others.

Mullins is a profane, violent, rough-and-tumble Boston cop who (also) doesn’t play well with others.

Naturally, the two make a great pair—the crime-busting equivalent of Simon and Garfunkel with firearms, Montana and Rice with anatomy jokes, Bert and Ernie with oodles of f-words. Such is the magic of movies: Two people who’d typically file restraining orders against each other somehow become the bestest of friends.

Oh, their partnership doesn’t begin smoothly. Fictional buddy-cop partnerships rarely do. Mullins is furious when Ashburn steals her parking spot and interviews her perp. Ashburn’s appalled by Mullins’ hygiene, language and borderline felonious behavior.

But eventually they realize they need each other.

After all, they’ve got a mysterious and brutal drug network to bring down—and Mullins’ brother is, unfortunately, involved. Mullins needs Ashburn’s super-secret FBI files (as Mullins can’t steal them all ). And Ashburn needs Mullins’ no-nonsense, streetwise ways. Because, really, if officers of the law can’t engage in a little police brutality now and then in the name of bringing in some really bad guys, how effective can they possibly be? (So says Hollywood.)

Positive Elements

Ashburn and Mullins have plenty of problems. But in the midst of the mess, you see their desire to protect innocent people and bring criminals to justice. Mullins takes her job so seriously, in fact, that she busted her own brother, Jason, when he got into drug dealing. And though she’s been ostracized by her entire family because of it, Mullins has no regrets. Jail, she confides to Ashburn, was the only way to keep him clean and out of the bad guys’ reach.

Ashburn grows to understand Mullins’ quirks and sees a great cop and a caring person beneath all that bruise-dispensing bluster. When fellow agents mock Mullins in one of her many mugshots, Ashburn flies to her partner’s defense, saying that Mullins is a better cop than anyone in the room—herself included. It’s a rare display of humility by the FBI agent and a sign that some of her own rough edges are being filed down.

We eventually learn that some of Ashburn’s insecurities are related to having bounced around in a foster-care system for most of her childhood. It’s a small nod to the importance of being raised in a loving home, one that later prompts Mullins to give Ashburn this touching message: “Foster kid, now you have a sister.”

Spiritual Elements

Mullins’ family owns several kitschy black-velvet paintings of Jesus participating in sports: knocking a home run as a member of the Boston Red Sox; scoring a goal as a Bruin; slamming home a basketball as a Celtic. They’re much treasured by Mullins’ father, but they’re obviously intended as a visual gag for rest of us.

When the pair tracks a suspect to a nightclub, Mullins buys a glass of whiskey as part of a ruse. When she learns that it’s $14, she asks if it was “served in Jesus’ shoe.” Elsewhere, someone asks Ashburn if she’s selling Bibles (due to her conservative clothing).

Sexual Content

In the same nightclub, we see several scantily dressed women dancing seductively, including some who seem particularly interested in each other. Mullins slices the sleeves and legs off of Ashburn’s outfit so she looks more at home in the nightclub. Ashburn dances and carouses with a suspect (who tells her he’s never been physically aroused by a woman over 40 before), comically and sensually moving with him in order to bug his phone.

A picture of a woman’s bare behind hangs in an apartment. Prostitutes and other women sport significant cleavage. Mullins arrests a married man for soliciting a prostitute. She then calls his wife to tell her about the affair, and Mullins grows particularly irate when she learns he has five kids. Mullins runs into two former lovers who still have feelings for her; she kisses one of them passionately. When someone accuses her of being racist, Mullins says that nine out of the 10 people she typically sleeps with are black.

Ashburn and Mullins talk about vaginas a lot (their own and other women’s) and make frequent references to male privates too. When Ashburn and Mullins spend a drunken night out on the town, we see Ashburn dance with her shirt unbuttoned (her bra visible), slow dance with a couple of old men and, finally, dance with each other. Mullins later tells her that she spent much of the night kissing one of the men she met.

The pair finds a used condom. People touch, adjust, talk about and encourage the examination of breasts. A reference is made to oral sex.

Violent Content

The drug network that Ashburn and Mullins seek to bring down features a particularly sadistic hit man named Julian, a nasty killer with a predilection for knives. Ashburn and Mullins see pictures of his grotesque handiwork early on (as do we), including bloody body parts. Later, when the two detectives land in his nefarious clutches (tied up in two chairs), he shows them several knives with which he plans to carve them up. He’s called away momentarily and asks Ashburn to hold the knife for him—jamming it into her thigh. Mullins manages to pull the knife free and cut herself loose. But when she hears footsteps, she tells Ashburn she’ll have to put the knife back. So she stabs Ashburn twice to get the thing to stick again in her leg.

Several people get shot, and the resulting wounds (including some in the forehead) result in blood spray. One man is shot twice in the groin (more blood spray), while another has his male anatomy threatened in a game of Russian roulette. Mullins keeps a slew of guns and grenades in her fridge. Ashburn’s car blows up, killing an unfortunate man to whom she’d drunkenly given it. The two cops blow up several thugs with a grenade. They also accidentally drop a suspect from a second-story building onto a car’s hood below. Mullins tackles and wrestles criminals. And she inflicts pain upon many people (mostly suspected felons) by twisting various body parts (hands, arms, portions of their chests, etc.). She gets one of them to stop running by hitting him with a watermelon. She and Ashburn head-butt others.

Ashburn and Mullins inspect the body of a low-level drug dealer in the morgue. In addition to the bullet wound in his forehead, the forensic scientists tells the detectives that the man had his tongue removed and inserted into his body elsewhere. She then shows the tongue.

Someone is nearly killed by having air injected into his bloodstream. Ashburn cuts her hand on a broken beer bottle. Ashburn tries to save a choking man in a restaurant by performing a makeshift tracheotomy. We watch as she cuts into the man’s neck, sticks her fingers into the wound and stuffs a straw into what she hopes is his larynx. When the straw spouts blood, Ashburn realizes she’s probably made a mistake.

Crude or Profane Language

At least 150 f-words, nearly 70 s-words and a mountain of other profanities, including “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch,” “d‑‑n,” “d‑‑k,” “t-ts” and “h‑‑‑.” Characters misuse God’s name more than 60 times (including at least a dozen pairings with “d‑‑n”), and Jesus’ name is abused about 20 times.

Remarkably, one of Ashburn’s traits early on is her unwillingness to swear. She watches her words carefully and asks that Mullins do the same. But in a transformative moment of sorts, when she comes to Mullins’ defense against some mocking co-workers, Ashburn abruptly starts swearing—uncomfortably at first, but growing ever more assured as the vulgarities pile up. Perversely, then, cursing becomes verbal shorthand in the movie for her metamorphosis into a better person. Those who don’t cuss are, we’re told, too uptight and full of themselves to be of much use to anyone.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Heat’ s plot is predicated on bringing down a network of drug dealers. Accordingly, we see and hear a great deal about illicit substances. People are busted for marijuana and cocaine possession. One man smokes a joint. Jason has some gruesome-looking track marks on his arm.

Mullins and Ashburn go out drinking and get thoroughly plastered. We see them quaf shots and glasses of beer. Other people drink and smoke cigarettes as well. The prescription drug Ritalin is mentioned.

Other Negative Elements

Ashburn and Mullins steal things and act unethically. Mullins insults and bullies her boss. Mullins’ family snidely confesses a litany of sins, including stealing laptops. People are accused of racism. An albino is unfairly presumed to be an evildoer.

Sandra Bullock can be pretty funny. Melissa McCarthy can be funny too. So you’d think that they’d be even funnier together.

And they are—up to a point.

The Heat could’ve been just as funny—funnier, in fact—without the scads of raw language and body-part jokes. This movie is so profane, in fact, that bits of the trailer had to be scrubbed clean to air it on TV and before other movies.

I know, I know: Crass is in. And most of today’s comedic actors and actresses seem to feel they’re at their best when they’re creatively employing the f-word.

But as someone who loves to laugh—and laugh with my kids—it’s really unfortunate. It’s sad to think that 30 years from now when people look back at this age of comediy, Academy Awards producers will be hard pressed to find a classic clip to air on Oscar night without significant editing. Unless, of course, we reach a point by then where there really is no such thing as a curse word. In that case, we’ll have bigger problems to worry about.

I realize that comedy is in some respects about being impolite, about making people feel uncomfortable. It’s about the shock, the unexpected turn of phrase or pratfall. But when I consider some of the comedic greats from ages past—from Charlie Chaplain to Lucille Ball, from Bill Cosby to Bugs Bunny to Bill Murray—they were often very funny without relying upon profanity to deliver the punch line. You could uncover a clip or movie or even a whole career from among them that you could show to almost anyone and say, “Now that’s how it’s done. That’s funny.”

Ferrell, Galifianakis and, yes, McCarthy, on the other hand?

What they do isn’t funny. It’s actually rather sad. And that turns The Heat into lukewarm leftovers.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Movie Review: The Heat (2013)

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--> August 5, 2013

The Heat (2013) by The Critical Movie Critics

Two tough gals.

The buddy cop genre gets a gender twist in Paul Feig’s The Heat , much as the pre-wedding shenanigans genre did in Feig’s 2011 film “ Bridesmaids .” Both films are comedies full of outrageous moments that are determined to throw subtlety out of the window. Of an airplane. Into a volcano. Yet as important as it is that Hollywood is finally realizing that half the population care about more than men and shoes, it’s also important to remember that rehashing old plots and character stereotypes doesn’t suddenly become necessitated — or even valid — purely because the genders have been switched up. The assumption that it does is counterproductive in itself.

The film brings back “Bridesmaids” star Melissa McCarthy as a similarly crude, unapologetic character, this time as police officer Mullins, who has nothing but contempt for authority. On the other side of the spectrum, Sandra Bullock is straight-laced, ambitious FBI agent Ashburn, whose greatest source of company comes in the form of stolen moments with the neighbors cat. Naturally, the two somehow end up paired to work together to find and catch a drug lord; how this happens doesn’t really matter, and seemingly neither does the case. Details such as these are inconsequential — merely tools to throw the two women together and see what comes of the reaction. And for the most part it isn’t bad, offering quite a few laughs by way of the clashes and rivalry, with McCarthy’s improvisation usually being on the mark. Bullock is also pretty well cast, bouncing off her partner’s jokes whilst creating a nice chemistry between them.

The use of two lead women in a typically male genre would often result in some stereotypical moments focused around Hollywood’s perception of women, but The Heat (in a move that should be followed by many films for years to come) treats its characters as police officers who are also women, rather than the other way around. In particular, we have to credit the film for steering pretty clear of romantic attachments; even “Bridesmaids” ended with lead Kristin Wiig finding a man. Here, Feig instead chooses to focus on the relationship between the two main characters, much like any buddy cop movie would, understanding that comedy doesn’t have to be tailored to female stereotypes in order to appeal to women. In this vein, scenes such as the standard drunken bonding moment or the predictable pre-climax break up seem to be aware of their own ridiculousness, and paired with one particularly grotesque occasion involving spurting blood in a diner, Feig reminds us that his slapstick may be a touch too far, but is never half-hearted.

Drunk and loving it.

However, the two leads are just barely managing to make lemonade from a pretty sour lemon of a script — one that’s predictable, thin and completely wastes the supporting cast. Actors such as Marlon Wayans and Michael Rapaport are instantly likable and funny — not to mention Jane Curtis who barely has ten lines — and clearly have more to offer than permitted by the two dimensional characters created by the script. Screenwriter Katie Dippold also relies too much on the previously mentioned improv, which despite often being funny, is dragged out and soon grows old. At nearly 120 minutes, Feig would have seriously improved the film by cutting it down to make the jokes feel snappier and the plot move faster. In fact, the scenes that probably need to be cut first are those in which he tries to add some sort of deeper meaning; they’re often thrown in too haphazardly to actually pull on any heartstrings, and the film would be more enjoyable if it just embraced its brash nature.

As far as entertainment goes, The Heat fares well, with some truly hilarious moments that use the physical comedy of Bullock and McCarthy to full effect. It recognizes the struggle that women face in largely male-dominated jobs, but doesn’t dwell on it, instead taking a light-hearted approach. Even with a script that has no real surprises and characters that aren’t believable, let alone sympathetic, it manages to be some good (profanity-laden, farcical) fun. It’s just a shame that for a film that takes such an important step for female-centered comedies and is so emphatically unapologetic of its bluntness, it is entirely forgettable.

Tagged: cop , drugs , partner

P loves dancing and hates people that don't give a film their full attention. She also uses words like love and hate far too liberally.

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'Movie Review: The Heat (2013)' have 10 comments

August 5, 2013 @ 3:50 pm Kelly Hanser

Incredible. Every other word out of Melissa McCarthy’s mouth is a curse word. That’s got to be a Hollywood first.

August 8, 2013 @ 12:45 pm Pavi Ramani

Perhaps, but while I don’t have any opposition to profanity AT ALL, I feel like it’s better when it’s used artfully or to actual effect as opposed to (as you say) every other word. When it’s that frequent it seems to ruin it a little.

August 5, 2013 @ 4:52 pm Somya

I love you Pavi, your reviews are so insightful and accurate. Also you are hot.

August 8, 2013 @ 12:40 pm Pavi Ramani

Not as hot as you, surely. Come visit me soon.

August 5, 2013 @ 7:02 pm BLADE

Funny, I just posted this question on the review for 2 Guns but it applies here as well.

In your opinion, who wins the buddy cop movie of the summer? 2 Guns or The Heat? I’m partial to 2 Guns for the grittier action but The Heat was far the funnier of the two.

August 8, 2013 @ 12:43 pm Pavi Ramani

I haven’t seen 2 Guns, but a) I’m partial to Mark Wahlberg and b) I feel like The Heat was too much of a let down compared to its potential for me to give it an anything of the summer title.

August 5, 2013 @ 10:15 pm Trapiac

Great combination. Bullock shines as a comedy stiff and McCarthy is at her best being fluid and profane.

August 6, 2013 @ 9:13 am Jacob

Hated it more than I hate getting my prostate checked.

August 8, 2013 @ 12:48 pm Pavi Ramani

I feel like this is a movie that either people who like Sandra Bullock’s previous work or liked Bridesmaids will actively like. I’m really not a fan of either – what were your thoughts on Bridesmaids?

August 8, 2013 @ 9:05 pm Jacob

Bridesmaids wasn’t so bad. The large ensemble cast kept the Melissa McCarthy train from picking up a head of steam and running off track. As for Sandra Bullock, generally she proves her worth, just didn’t here. She was a sleeping walking mannequin.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

There are only two reasons to see The Heat . But they are formidable reasons, and they go by the names of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. They play cops. Bullock is Sarah Ashburn, a socially inept FBI ramrod with her eye on a bigger job. McCarthy is Shannon Mullins, a battering ram of ball-busting fire who makes life hell in the Boston PD for anyone who gets in her way. Of course, Sarah sticks in her craw. Of course, the two will eventually bond. Of course, Bridesmaids director Paul Feig will put a shine on every cliché in the R-rated cop comedy book. The subtext in the all-over-the-place script by Katie Dippold is that women can behave just as boorishly as guys. Point taken, but that point gets tired very quickly. What does work is the hilarious interplay between the two stars. Learning that the irritating Sarah was once married, Shannon deadpans, “Was he a hearing man?” McCarthy is a force of comic nature. And she and Bullock mix it up like pros. In this dead-battery of a movie, these live-wires miraculously ignite sparks.

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"Too Crude"

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What You Need To Know:

THE HEAT stars Sandra Bullock as an uptight FBI agent pared up with a foul-mouthed, tough detective, played by Melissa McCarthy. The FBI agent, Sarah Ashburn, can catch things most other agents miss. When her boss gets promoted, she has the chance to be promoted too, but first she must take on a mission in Boston. In Boston, Ashburn meets Detective Shannon Mullins. Completely opposite, Mullins is rough, crude and feared, but she’s able to bring down many drug dealers and criminals. Ashburn and Mullins couldn’t be more different, but they must find a way to work together on an important murder case.

THE HEAT has some funny, exciting and suspenseful moments, but it’s extremely crude. The funniest parts are what moviegoers usually enjoy about Bullock – her clumsiness. McCarthy’s character, however, drops more than 100 “f” bombs and crude comments. As a result, THE HEAT has a mixed pagan worldview with too much crude content but also with some strong moral elements about fighting crime and doing the right thing. The crude content in THE HEAT will leave media-wise moviegoers cold.

(PaPa, BB, FR, LLL, VVV, S, AA, DD, M) Strong mixed pagan worldview with strong moral elements of protecting family and the law but marred by extremely crude comments and foul language, plus there’s a small necklace with a Buddha on it; more than 270 obscenities (including more than 140 “f” words), 28 strong profanities, and 60 light profanities, plus some extremely crude comments about female private parts and male private parts; very strong violence and some strong action and comic violence includes animated images of slitting someone’s throat which is later done when trying to save someone from choking (lots of blood shown), main character stabbed in the leg multiple times, man is shot in the head, tongue cut out, description of grotesque violence, main characters kill multiple people in defense, woman shoots man in private part multiple times, woman tortures man by pretending to shoot man in his private parts, woman pushes another woman; some mentions of sexual relations and private parts, plus some kissing; no nudity but some skimpy female clothing and cleavage; alcohol use and drunkenness; smoking and references to marijuana and cocaine use; and, lying.

More Detail:

THE HEAT is an action comedy starring Sandra Bullock as an FBI agent is pared up with her complete opposite, a police detective played by Melissa McCarthy of IDENTITY THIEF and MIKE & MOLLY on CBS-TV. THE HEAT is an extremely crude comedy with lots of strong foul language and some extreme violence, plus some drug references, all of which cancels out a strong moral message about protecting family and fighting evil criminals.

Sandra Bullock plays Sarah Ashburn, an uptight but efficient Federal agent who catches things that most other agents can’t. When her boss gets promoted, she has the opportunity to be promoted as well, but first she must take on a mission. Ashburn most go to Boston and find out the cause of several murders.

Arriving in Boston, Ashburn meets Detective Shannon Mullins, played by Melissa McCarthy. Completely opposite of Ashburn, Mullins is rough, crude and feared, but she’s able to bring in a lot of drug dealers and bad guys. Because of Mullin’s passion for the streets of Boston and keeping out the bad guys, she teams up with Ashburn on the mission to find who they think is behind all the murders.

As people, Ashburn and Mullins could not be more different, but they have to work with their differences in order to make any headway. Once they start to figure out some key things, they are stopped by their own people, including some other federal agents who are working on what appears to be the same case.

THE HEAT has some funny, exciting, and suspenseful moments, but it’s an extremely crude comedy. The funniest parts are what audiences always enjoy about Bullock – her clumsiness. McCarthy’s character says more than 100 “f” words and makes other crude comments. Only when she too has some clumsy moments will most moviegoers find her truly funny.

THE HEAT has some strong moral elements of fighting crime and protecting family, but all the crude content, not to mention some extremely violent content and some drug references, gives the movie a strong mixed, or pagan, worldview. Ultimately, the crude content in THE HEAT will leave discerning, media-wise viewers cold.

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Movie review: ‘Inside Out 2’ entertains but doesn’t age up with characters

In 2015, Pete Docter and Pixar gave us all a handy and fun visual metaphor to talk about how our emotions function in our day-to-day lives and in how we develop as people. Many a GIF and reaction meme were born with “Inside Out,” which provided a visual shorthand for expressing our strongest emotions through the story of Riley, a young girl from Minnesota who experiences a whole range as she moves with her family to San Francisco. It all becomes especially tumultuous when Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) accidentally disrupt the transmission of core memories and have to journey through Riley’s mind to stabilize the system.

Nine years later, in “Inside Out 2,” Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions, which also includes Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (now voiced by Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling), have found a comfortable stasis, coexisting in a harmony that has resulted in a strong sense of self. That “sense of self” is visualized in the film by a delicate, flowerlike structure that grows from a pool of core memories. From each memory grows a glowing strand of a belief system that can be plucked like a guitar string, resonating with a belief or mantra like, “I’m kind,” which results in the belief system “I’m a good person.”

Joy has been carefully tending this belief system, chucking Riley’s bad memories to the back of her mind, creating a happy-go-lucky kid who is totally ill-equipped for what’s coming: puberty. In “Inside Out 2,” directed by Kelsey Mann, written by Mann, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, everything is upended by puberty’s surprising arrival, along with a group of new, more complex emotions. HQ is demolished to make room for Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and the new emotion in charge, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

They burst into Riley’s brain on the eve of high school, and the morning of a three-day hockey skills camp she’s attending with her friends Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu). With Anxiety at the wheel, determined to build a new Riley in order to keep her safe, the plot of “Inside Out 2” is essentially “Riley has a panic attack at hockey camp,” but of course there’s so much more going on internally, which is the real story of the film. Once again, Joy has to go on a journey through Riley’s brain, this time to save her sense of self; once again, Joy has to learn that Riley has to experience and navigate every emotion, including these new, thornier ones, in order to be a whole person.

Once again there’s a nagging sense that’s something’s missing: where’s Logic? Reason? Rationality? As each emotion takes a turn at the console controlling what’s going on in Riley’s head, it’s clear that she’s not in charge at all, which doesn’t entirely make sense for a newly minted teenager, pubescent or not. The bored, French cool girl Ennui takes charge when it comes to the more intellectual issues, such as hitting the sarcasm button to overcorrect an embarrassing moment (as she does so, it opens a “sar-chasm” in the Stream of Consciousness, part of the film’s signature wordplay).

One has to put these questions aside in order to fully enjoy “Inside Out 2,” though it is rather entertaining, diverting enough, especially with the new characters, who steal the show. Hawke and Edebiri deliver the best vocal performances as the tightly wound Anxiety and Envy, dueling demonic twins, and Exarchopoulos is inspired casting. There’s also a fun sequence with a few new characters who are found in the vault in Riley’s head, a crush on a video game character, Lance, and Bloofy (Ron Funches) a cartoon dog from a show aimed at preschoolers, who are legitimately funny and offer the animators a chance to play with character design and style. These characters are also vastly underused.

The new emotion character design is creative and fun, especially Anxiety (Embarrassment and Ennui seem to be nods to the 1980s language-learning cartoon “Muzzy”) while the human/“real world” design is par for the Pixar course: hard, shiny and photo-realistic in certain moments. It makes you wonder if this would be better served as depicted with real actors in a live-action format.

As Riley grows up in “Inside Out 2” the metaphor is stretched to its limits, unfairly rendering her a quivering mess ruled entirely by emotions. The visual representation of how emotions and memories create a belief system and sense of self are indeed useful for talking to kids about how their inner lives and brains work, and the imagery is smart and creative, but it has the feeling of an educational children’s book. The film’s internal logic tests our own belief systems, and fails to impart anything profoundly insightful to an adult audience.

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Beat the heat this weekend with new films

by Chante Rutherford

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — On this 614 Day, you can hit the movies and check out the some films to start your weekend. Hope Madden and George Wolf of MaddWolf talk about three new movies.

MaddWolf is also back at Gateway for their Fright Night Live for the live recording of their podcast. They'll be discussing the Borgman from 2013. Head to Gatewayfilmcenter.com for more details.

And Happy Anniversary to Hope and George!

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In the Heat of the Night 4KUHD

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Genre	Thriller
Format	Blu-ray
Contributor	Sidney Poitier, William Schallert, Rod Steiger, Peter Whitney, James Patterson, Quentin Dean, Norman Jewison, Anthony James, Larry Gates, Warren Oates, Scott Wilson, Matt Clark, Beah Richards, Lee Grant
Language	English
Runtime	1 hour and 40 minutes

From the manufacturer

Kino Lorber Studio Classics is dedicated to bringing you the best of Hollywood’s successes, critical and commercial. All from best available sources, many on DVD or Blu-ray for the very first time.

Product Description

This undisputed masterpiece from director Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair) is one of the most radical and acclaimed movies of its generation. Rod Steiger (A Fistful of Dynamite) gives an Oscar-winning performance as a sheriff from small-town Mississippi who finds himself in an uneasy alliance with a black homicide detective from Philadelphia—strikingly portrayed by Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field). In the course of investigating the crime, the two strong-willed men must reconcile their inherent prejudice towards each other. The final result is justice—and an unlikely but touching mutual respect. Supporting performances by Warren Oates (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) and Lee Grant (The Landlord), an evocative score by Quincy Jones (The Getaway) and vivid cinematography by Haskell Wexler (The Conversation) all add to the film’s authentic aura of a hot summer evening in the Deep South. Winner of five Academy Awards including Best Picture for Walter Mirisch (The Great Escape), Best Adapted Screenplay for Stirling Silliphant (Charly) and Best Editing for Hal Ashby (The Cincinnati Kid), In the Heat of the Night is a blistering commentary on race relations and a landmark in entertainment. This 4KUHD special edition also includes the In the Heat of the Night sequels They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and The Organization on the second Blu-ray disc.

Special Features: Disc 1 (4KUHD): -NEW Audio Commentary by Film Historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson with Robert Mirisch (Nephew of Walter Mirisch, and Son of the Mirisch Company Founder Harold Mirisch) -Audio Commentary by Director Norman Jewison, Cinematographer Haskell Wexler and Actors Rod Steiger and Lee Grant -5.1 Surround & Original 2.0 Mono -Optional English Subtitles -Triple-Layer UHD100 Disc

Disc 2 (BLU-RAY):

-THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS! (1970) – The sequel to In the Heat of the Night. Back in San Francisco, a high-priced call girl is murdered and Lieutenant Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) is on the case. Co-Starring Martin Landau and Barbara McNair and directed by Gordon Douglas. -THE ORGANIZATION (1971) – In this Tibbs/Poitier finale, Lieutenant Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) helps a group of idealistic vigilantes expose a drug ring controlled by powerful businessmen. Co-Starring Barbara McNair and Gerald S. O’Loughlin and directed by Don Medford. -Turning Up the Heat: Movie Making in the 60's - 2008 Featurette (21:10) -The Slap Heard Around the World - 2008 Featurette (7:25) -Quincy Jones: Breaking New Sound - 2008 Featurette (13:02) -Theatrical Trailers for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS! and THE ORGANIZATION

Product details

Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.85:1
MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 5 x 1 inches; 0.02 ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Norman Jewison
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Blu-ray
Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 40 minutes
Release date ‏ : ‎ April 19, 2022
Actors ‏ : ‎ Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Scott Wilson
Studio ‏ : ‎ Kl Studio Classics
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09S6RBWJM
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
#286 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)

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Bye bye, El Nino. Cooler hurricane-helping La Nina to replace the phenomenon that adds heat to Earth

The strong El Nino weather condition that added a bit of extra heat to already record warm global temperatures is gone

The strong El Nino weather condition that added a bit of extra heat to already record warm global temperatures is gone. It's cool flip side, La Nina, is likely to breeze in just in time for peak Atlantic hurricane season, federal meteorologists said.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Thursday pronounced dead the El Nino that warms parts of the central Pacific. The El Nino, while not quite a record breaker in strength, formed a year ago has been blamed, along with human-caused climate change and overall ocean warmth, for a wild 12 months of heat waves and extreme weather.

The world is now in a neutral condition when it comes to the important natural El Nino Southern Oscillation, which warps weather systems worldwide. Neutral is when weather gets closer to long-term averages or normal, something that hasn't happened as much recently as it used to, said NOAA physical scientist Michelle L’Heureux, who is the lead forecaster of the agency’s ENSO team. But it likely won't last, she added.

She said there's a 65% chance that a La Nina, a cooling of the same parts of the Pacific that often has opposite effects, will form in the July, August and September time period. One of the biggest effects of La Nina is that it tends to make Atlantic hurricane season more active, and that storm season starts its peak in August.

“The likelihood of a La Nina coupled with record warm sea surface temperatures is the reason the National Hurricane Center is forecasting an extraordinary hurricane season ,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist. “States from Texas to Maine are making preparations for an active year.”

Both El Nino and La Nina create “potential hot spots” for extreme weather but in different places and of different types, L'Heureux said.

“La Nina tends to, in the winter, bring drier conditions across the southern tier of the United States and if you put global warming on top of that, that could also mean those drier conditions could intensify into droughts,” L'Heureux said.

That's because storm systems, mostly in the winter, move slightly northward with a shift in the jet stream during La Nina years, bringing more rain and snow north, L'Heureux said.

Even though a La Nina tends to be cooler, there will likely be a residual effect of the exiting El Nino on global temperatures, L’Heureux said. This year has seen each month breaking global records so far.

No more than 8% of last year's record heat could be attributed to El Nino and other natural variability, a panel of 57 scientists concluded earlier this month. The rest was from human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

A 1999 economic study found that drought from La Nina cost the United States agriculture between $2.2 billion to $6.5 billion, which is far more than the $1.5 billion cost of El Nino. A neutral ENSO is best for agriculture.

Given La Nina's connection to Atlantic hurricanes and drought in the United States it makes sense that they are generally costlier, but every El Nino and La Nina is different, so people and governments should prepare for them, said meteorologist and economist Michael Ferrari, chief scientific officer of AlphaGeo, a firm that works on financial investments and climate.

The El Nino that just ended “wasn't a record-breaker in anybody's book, but it was probably about top five,” L'Heureux said. And it added to overall global temperature and brought more moisture to the southern United States this year, along with drier conditions in parts of South America and Central America, she said. The Horn of Africa got wetter.

Coral reef experts say the combination of record ocean temperatures and the boost of heating from El Nino have led to a major global bleaching event threatening and at times killing vulnerable coral.

Before this year’s El Nino, the world had back-to-back-to-back La Ninas , which is unusual, L’Heureux said. Some studies have shown that the globe should expect more El Ninos and La Ninas — and fewer neutrals — as the world warms, but it’s still an unsettled issue, she said.

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The Heat (2013)
The Heat movie review & film summary (2013)
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The Heat movie review & film summary (2013)
Yes, "The Heat" is a cop-buddy film, and of course there is a case to be solved. But nobody cares about the familiarity of the premise. What matters is the dynamic between the leads, and here it's consistently humorous, entertaining, often cringe-inducting due to the awkwardness, and, occasionally deep. While the pace of the film is uneven ...
The Heat
Rated: 3.5/5 Mar 26, 2022 Full Review Kip Mooney College Movie Review If Hot Fuzz is the gold standard for recent buddy-cop movies and The Other Guys is the silver, then The Heat is the bronze.
Movie Review
Gemma La Mana/Fox. The Heat. Director: Paul Feig. Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime. Running Time: 117 minutes. Rated R for pervasive language, strong crude content and some violence. With: Sandra ...
The Heat
The Heat is a breath of fresh air for what the film brings to the buddy cop comedy genre. Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2023. Mark Jackson Epoch Times. Bawdy, R-rated, and the racial ...
The Heat (2013)
The Heat: Directed by Paul Feig. With Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans. An uptight FBI Special Agent is paired with a foul-mouthed Boston cop to take down a ruthless drug lord.
The Heat
The Heat is the best female buddy-cop movie since, well, ever. Read More By Claudia Puig FULL REVIEW. User Reviews User Reviews View All ... (2013). read rest of the review on my blog, google cinema omnivore. Read More Report. 3. MrCheeks Jan 14, 2014 McCarthy over-acted, she was too edgy and carried on her comedy scenes too long. The story ...
The Heat Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 21 ): Kids say ( 61 ): The Heat takes a typically male genre -- the buddy-cop action movie -- and turns it on its head, serving up a hilarious, if predictable, contribution to the genre. The film's best assets are its leads, who share an easy, believable rapport, even if they're very different.
The Heat (2013)
Permalink. 10/10. Bullock and McCarthy Bring "The Heat". jon.h.ochiai 4 July 2013. "The Heat" is hysterical. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy are awesome! "The Heat" is the funniest movie of the year. I laughed out loud a lot. Yes, Sandra and Melissa reliably play in position.
Film Review: 'The Heat'
Film Review: 'The Heat'. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play a reluctant buddy-cop pair in an R-rated comedy that sacrifices action for consistent laughs. They don't get along onscreen ...
The Heat: Film Review
Movies; Movie Reviews; The Heat: Film Review. Paul Feig's comedy stars Sandra Bullock as an uptight FBI agent and Melissa McCarthy as a crass Boston street cop. By Todd McCarthy. Plus Icon.
'The Heat' Is a Buddy Movie Without Any Guys
The Heat. Directed by Paul Feig. Action, Comedy, Crime. R. 1h 57m. By A.O. Scott. June 27, 2013. The high-concept description of "The Heat" is that it's a cop-buddy movie with women, which ...
The Heat (film)
The Heat is a 2013 American buddy cop action comedy film directed by Paul Feig and written by Katie Dippold.It stars Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy with Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Michael Rapaport, and Jane Curtin in supporting roles. The film centers on FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn and Boston Detective Shannon Mullins, who must take down a mobster in Boston.
The Heat Movie Review
The buddy movie has been around for so long it seems incredible to think there's still anywhere to go but The Heat manages to achieve that by simply changing the gender of its two main protagonists. It's been over thirty years since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte established the template for the mismatched buddy-cop movie in Walter Hill's 48 Hours and it makes you wonder why it's taken so ...
Movie Review: Rub Two Styles of Comedy Together and You Get ...
The odd couple at the center of The Heat isn't just uptight Sandra Bullock and uncouth Melissa McCarthy; it's also two different styles of comedy. Bullock has played a cop several times before ...
Heat movie review & film summary (1995)
There is a sequence at the center of Michael Mann's "Heat" that illuminates the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna (Al Pacino) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley (Robert De Niro) for days. McCauley is smart and wary and seems impossible to trap. So, one evening, tailing McCauley's car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.
Movie Review: 'The Heat'
Movie Review: 'The Heat'. Gabe Johnson • June 28, 2013. The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "The Heat," starring Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock.
Twenty-Five Years Later, 'Heat' Is Still the Juice
Heat was shot on crisp 35 mm film, and it's a beautiful-looking movie, but its follow-ups have been suspended between clarity and murk; think of the neon rainbows of Collateral, or Miami Vice ...
The Heat
The Heat could've been just as funny—funnier, in fact—without the scads of raw language and body-part jokes. This movie is so profane, in fact, that bits of the trailer had to be scrubbed clean to air it on TV and before other movies. I know, I know: Crass is in.
Movie Review: The Heat (2013)
Even with a script that has no real surprises and characters that aren't believable, let alone sympathetic, it manages to be some good (profanity-laden, farcical) fun. It's just a shame that for a film that takes such an important step for female-centered comedies and is so emphatically unapologetic of its bluntness, it is entirely forgettable.
Peter Travers Reviews 'The Heat'
The Heat. By Peter Travers. July 8, 2013. There are only two reasons to see The Heat. But they are formidable reasons, and they go by the names of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. They play ...
Movie Review: The Heat
Neither one of them having any real choice in the matter, Ashburn and Mullins reluctantly partner up and try to work together to hunt down the drug lord and bring him in. Juvenile, silly, and ridiculous, The Heat is an incredibly unfunny, awkward Odd Couple film that has only three original laughs in the entire movie. Sandra Bullock and Melissa ...
The Heat (2013)
R 1 hr 57 min Jun 28th, 2013 Action, Comedy, Crime. Uptight and straight-laced, FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn is a methodical investigator with a reputation for excellence--and hyper-arrogance ...
THE HEAT
THE HEAT is an extremely crude comedy with lots of strong foul language and some extreme violence, plus some drug references, all of which cancels out a strong moral message about protecting family and fighting evil criminals. Sandra Bullock plays Sarah Ashburn, an uptight but efficient Federal agent who catches things that most other agents ...
The Beekeeper (2024 film)
The Beekeeper is a 2024 American action thriller film directed by David Ayer and written by Kurt Wimmer.The film stars Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Phylicia Rashad, Jemma Redgrave and Jeremy Irons.When his kind-hearted landlady commits suicide after falling victim to a phishing scam, former "Beekeeper" operative Adam Clay sets out on a brutal campaign for ...
Movie review: 'Inside Out 2' entertains but doesn't age up with
A&E; Movies; Movie review: 'Inside Out 2' entertains but doesn't age up with characters June 12, 2024 Updated Thu., June 13, 2024 at 3:11 p.m. A teen's inner emotions are introduced to a ...
Beat the heat this weekend with new films
This 6-14 weekend, hit up the movies and watch these 3 that MaddWolf reviewed this round. ... Beat the heat this weekend with new films. by Chante Rutherford. Fri, June 14th 2024 at 10:50 AM.
This Heat Character Is Even More Important in the Sequel
A group of high-end professional thieves start to feel the heat from the LAPD when they unknowingly leave a verbal clue at their latest heist. DirectorMichael Mann. Release DateDecember 15, 1995 ...
In the Heat of the Night 4KUHD
-Turning Up the Heat: Movie Making in the 60's - 2008 Featurette (21:10)-The Slap Heard Around the World - 2008 Featurette (7:25) ... The movie synopsis & review can be gotten anywhere. Chances are most people know how wonderful this & other movies are. We as consumers need relevant reviews pertaining to the 4k transfer, the colors & blacks ...
Bye bye, El Nino. Cooler hurricane-helping La Nina to replace the
A 1999 economic study found that drought from La Nina cost the United States agriculture between $2.2 billion to $6.5 billion, which is far more than the $1.5 billion cost of El Nino. A neutral ...

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