The Heat

Director Paul Feig was savvy to re-enlist breakout star Melissa McCarthy for his follow-up to their 2011 smash Bridesmaids: She’s the best thing in this amiable but routine action-comedy about a mismatched law enforcement pair trying to bring down a Boston drug lord.

Sandra Bullock plays Ashburn, an FBI special agent who is brilliant, by-the-book, and abhorred by her colleagues for her superior airs and prim mouth (“bull feces!” is about as demonstrative as she gets in the face of adversity). McCarthy’s Mullins, on the other hand, is a Boston detective who is vulgar, slovenly, and quick to invective-riddled outrage. Settling comfortably into types familiar to them, McCarthy and Bullock embody a tetchy yin and yang that – predictably – will meet on middle ground.

Feig, who has shone on the small screen directing innovative comedies like The Office and Arrested Development (he also created Freaks and Geeks), is not a natural with action; one car chase around the streets of Boston rather feels like a series of molasses-slow left turns. Similarly, first-time feature screenwriter Katie Dippold (a writer/co-producer on TV’s Parks & Recreation) has no knack for dramatizing police work. And for two supposedly genius dispensers of law and order, Ashburn and Mullins sure leave a lot of dead bodies in their wake, in oafish jolts of violence as ill-fitting as the film’s few whiffs of teary drama.

Oh, but more often than not The Heat is just stupid-funny, which circles us back to McCarthy, motor-mouthing four-letter fury like an operatic aria. She sells Mullins as delightfully unhinged and fairly radiating with rage, and it’s irresistible. To the producers, too: Word is, a sequel is already in the works.