The Heat

There were a couple scenes in The Heat that weren't funny, and Sandra Bullock's face is a disaster, but Melissa McCarthy carried the movie and kept me laughing entire way through. 

I thought the trailer for The Heat was funny enough, but I figured the movie would be pretty dopey, and I wasn't interested in seeing it. Everybody seemed to like it after it came out, though, and Roeper gave it a good review, so I didn't want to miss out. I'm definitely glad I saw it. It was just as funny as the trailer, and unlike so many movies, it didn't have all the good jokes in the trailer. There were tons of good jokes for the whole movie, not just the three or four you see in the trailer. And the director says in the commentary that he likes to put alternate stuff in the trailer so there's new stuff to see when you watch the movie, so there you go.

The first thing I noticed in the movie was that Sandra Bullock looks terrible. It's like she went to her plastic surgeon and said "give me the Michael Jackson." I'm so glad I didn't see this in the theater. It would've been like Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables all over again. Blech. I can kind of relate to Ashburn, though.


Maybe that's why the scene in the nightclub bathroom didn't quite work for me. I was just as freaked out about the clothes getting cut up as Ashburn was. I'm not sure it really makes sense for her to be wearing Spanx, though. At a certain build, you really don't need Spanx. The bar scene was probably the worst. It didn't work for me at all. It was totally unnecessary. It was a good setup for when Wayne blows up, though. That was a great surprise; I wasn't expecting it at all. And it's cool to know that the guy Mullins makes out with is actually McCarthy's husband. I loved that she had all these guys mooning over her.

 The plot as a whole worked fine, although since I know Michael McDonald from MAD TV, he didn't really work for me as a bad guy. Taran Killam has got to be the worst actor on the planet. I figured he was either the mole or a really bad actor, and it turns out he was both, because he was still a terrible actor after he was revealed as the mole. I've seen Kaitlin Olson in It's Always Sunny too much to believe her as Tatiana, but I don't think that had anything to do with her acting.

I knew Mullins' brother wasn't going to have accurate information about the shipment, too. I thought it was kind of dumb that Ashburn fell for it, but it worked out okay in terms of the overall plot, so I guess I can forgive it. A lot of the emotional stuff really worked. You can feel the devastation for Ashburn when it's the wrong boat, and they've got all those people out there for nothing. And then it's immediately followed by finding out Mullins' brother is in a coma, which also works.

I liked seeing Ashburn get knocked down a peg when she was totally wrong in her treatment of the choking guy. It didn't seem to have much of a long-term effect, though. I love how she refused to curse the whole time. The contrast with Mullins' language was really good, and the scene at the end when she finally blows up is great. The fight over the cell phone was funny, too.

The scene where Mullins has to stab Ashburn with the knife was pretty effective. I couldn't believe she stabbed her with it twice. I didn’t buy Ashburn as a foster kid. Maybe I'm stereotyping too much, but I always think of foster kids as being troubled, not being nerdy and arrogant and having superiority complexes. Sandra came up with that idea for Ashburn, so I can blame that for why it seems "off."

The part where Mullins goes on and on and on about the Chief's balls didn't work for me, either. Say one or two things and leave it at that; it stops being funny after a while. The director said they shot each line individually, and then just for kicks on the last take he had her say all of them. He thought it was really funny, so he put it in that way, but I don’t agree.

Melissa McCarthy is great. I think it was Lauren Graham that I heard saying Melissa's talents were totally wasted on Gilmore Girls, and she was right. I haven't really seen Melissa in anything else, but she's what makes The Heat so good. Her delivery is perfect, and she comes up with a lot of funny stuff on her own. I think Sandra came up with the part where she keeps walking in the wrong direction when the Chief takes her to the holding cell, which was great.