hI barely remember seeing trailers for The Heat, which is symptomatic of one of the many problems with Hollywood. Because this movie is pretty damn funny and I feel like I would have seen it sooner, if I had known that.

The plot is one we have seen many, many times, whether it’s the typical buddy comedy with one guy playing the straight man, or whether it’s a cop-specific version with one the straight-laced cop and the other is the cop that breaks the rules. (I mean, there are four? Lethal Weapon movies on this premise alone.) But I don’t know that we’ve seen the female angle on this trope before, and that’s appreciated not just because it feels fresh but because the script makes a lot of “women in the workplace” jokes that are somehow still relevant decades after 9 to 5.

But there are not just jokes about women cops and how men can’t handle women being cops, there are also jokes based on the buddy cop comedy formula and, for me, these are the ones that are really successful. There are a few of them that are really, really great and on the level of Hot Fuzz.

There’s also some really great physical comedy from both leads, which adds a lot to the otherwise fairly generic “one of us swears, one of us doesn’t” shtick that they mine a lot of the time.

Anyway, this is just a really solid comedy and I’m amazed I hadn’t heard much about it.

8/10

• Directed by Paul Feig
• Produced by Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping
• Written by Katie Dippold
• Starring:
  • Sandra Bullock
  • Melissa McCarthy
  • Demián Bichir
  • Marlon Wayans
  • Michael Rapaport
• Music by Michael Andrews
• Cinematography Robert Yeoman
• Edited by Brent White, Jay Deuby
• Production companies: Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment
• Distributed by 20th Century Fox
• Release date: June 23, 2013
• Running time: 117 minutes
• Country: United States
• Language: English
• Budget: $43 million
• Box office: $229.9 million