Cambridge Day, Here and Sphere
‘The Heat’: Feig’s funny, filthy-mouthed buddy cops are going to clean up Bahston
June 30, 2013
“The Heat” is funnier than it should be. Part of that’s because director Paul Feig has a way of taking flimsy ideas and strong comedic actors and creating lightning in a bottle. He did it with Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig in “Bridesmaids” and does so again here. If there’s any doubt that it’s more the actors than Feig, I’ll simply point to McCarthy’s recent woeful outing in “Identity Theft.” It’s not so much what he does with the material but the chemistry he educes between his stars and how they build something infectious from thin setups.
The premise behind “The Heat,” which was shot in in our glorious city of Boston, though it doesn’t look so much like the Boston you and I know, is pretty much the same old comedic cop buddy story popularized by Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in “48 Hrs.,” and later, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the “Lethal Weapon” series, except here, the oddball pairing is women and the focus is more on the funny than the dark and grim, though people do get shot in the head enough and blood does spurt. Continue reading
Sans rules and with limited resources, what would you do? Snatch and grab, help out or hole up doomsday-prepper style?
Pot humor and pop-up party guests such as Rihanna keep the slow-moving premise (Baruchel also hates Hill and is a bit of whining wet noodle to boot) alive, though there are nuggets of WTF humor that snap you out of the stupor, including Michael Cera (yup, the anemic, sweet wimp from “Juno”) doing blow and getting a rim job in the bathroom while sipping an effete cocktail he seems to relish more than the sex act. 
One major early steppingstone was the 2004 remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” which featured an eclectic cast (Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley) and zombies that could run at full tilt. Danny Boyle had done that bit before and better with “28 Days Later …” and there’s really no one who can out-shamble Romero in the walking dead genre he pretty much invented. But sure enough, in the maddening, flesh-ripping mayhem, Snyder had carved out his niche as a hyperactive visual stylist. 
The premise of a wonk working for a private intelligence firm to protect corporations and the like from social terrorists, unscrupulous competitors and till-fleecing insiders is intriguing and builds nicely at the onset. It’s just the mechanics and fruition that get the pink slip. 
Most people would envy such heavy choices, but this is the third (and perhaps final) episode of Richard Linklater’s “Before” series and another cheeky exercise in endless talk, philosophical what-ifs and passive self-indulgence, which isn’t bad, mind you, it’s just not a real thing for most people. 
If you’re wondering why the actor, who holds an obvious penchant for sci-fi, would jump in the water with a man on his last breath, the answer is likely his son. “After Earth” is not a Will Smith movie, but a Jaden Smith movie. The young thespian held his own with dad in the underrated and wholly affecting pull-yourself-up drama “The Pursuit of Happyness” and was effective in “The Karate Kid” reboot. But this, this is Jaden’s coming out party, a big-screen bar mitzvah for Papa Smith to declare to the world, “My son is an actor.”
For What it's Worth 