The heat comedy of the week
The film starts with FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) being paired with Detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) who is a foul-mouthed and needlessly violent interrogator. After Mullins finds out about Ashburn’s kind disposition, the two don’t get along. They eventually warm to each other. Ashburn soon finds out the boss at the Boston FBI office Levy (Marlon Wayans) has a crush on her and Mullins introduces Ashburn to her family, who all hate Mullins because she put her brother Jason (Michael Rapaport) in prison.
The Heat is screenwriter Katie Dippold’s feature film debut. Dippold wrote the spec script on the side while fulfilling writing duties on Parks and Recreation and ultimately sold it to producer Peter Chernin for $600,000 prior to even being presented to prospective bidders. Inspired by the buddy cop film genre, primarily examples such as Running Scared (1986) and Lethal Weapon (1987), Dippold set out to write a film in which the leads were portrayed by women. As Dippold explains, “In Running Scared, they go down to the Caribbean and there’s this montage of them on scooters, and there’s a different hot girl on the back every time it cuts back to the scooter. And it just felt like, I don’t want to be the girl on the back of the scooter. I want to be the awesome cop doing this stuff.”
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Despite the success of Bridesmaids (2011), studio executives were still uncertain of an action film with a female-led cast. “There were people suspicious of this attempt, who thought girls won’t want to see a cop action movie and guys won’t want to see two girls holding guns and we’d cancel out our potential audience,” said producer Jenno Topping. “But we really believed, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be about gender as much as it would be about delivering a courageous action comedy with some heart to it.”On May 19, 2012, director Paul Feig and actors Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy signed on to the film after previously struggling to close deals due to scheduling and payment conflicts. At this time, the film was called The Untitled Female Buddy Cop Comedy.Principal photography for The Heat began on July 05, 2012 at Dudley Square in Boston, Massachusetts.On October 10, 2012, it was announced that composer Michael Andrews would be composing the score to The Heat, having previously scored Feig’s Bridesmaids and Unaccompanied Minors (2006). A soundtrack album containing songs featured in the film was released on June 25, 2013 by Lakeshore Records. Of these songs, the album includes a brand new track entitled “Rock This” by Santigold. Describing why he chose the songs featured in the film, Feig said, “My favorite part of filmmaking is finding the perfect music to complement what’s happening on screen. And I wanted The Heat to feel like a party. I wanted the audience to have fun. And since I have to watch a movie hundreds of times as I’m making it, I wanted to use music that I wouldn’t get tired of. Every song in this film is a desert island song for me. I will never get sick of them.”While originally intended to be released on April 5, 2013, 20th Century Fox pushed back the film’s release date to June 28, 2013. The film held its world premiere in New York City on June 23, 2013.The film has earned mixed to positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 63% based on reviews from 118 reviews. The site’s consensus is: “The Heat is predictable, but Melissa McCarthy is reliably funny and Sandra Bullock proves a capable foil.” Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 59 out of 100 based on 33 reviews.
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