The Heat

Rex Reed called Melissa McCarthy “tractor-sized,” “humongous,” and “a female hippo” in his review of The Identity Thief, a movie I haven’t seen. I was surprised to find that Reed wasn’t dead, he has had so little impact on my life as a film critic. I can only say I won’t mourn his death. Take your review and shove it up your Holland-tunnel-sized asshole, you pathetic, ugly, bitchy old queen.

That said, there is no getting around the fact that MM is enormous, and I worry about her. Her butt really is about a wide as she is tall. I’d hate to lose her the way we lost John Candy and Chris Farley and maybe James Gandolfini. I know she was in some television shows, but I had never heard of her until she stole the surprise hit Bridesmaids from all those knockout ladies around her. She did it by ignoring the fact that she was fat and not very pretty and acting like the horniest guy in any of 500,000 guy-buddy gross-out comedies. She scared guys, and we loved it. There was never a hint of her feeling sorry for herself, and never a hint that the other girls didn’t like her just as much as they liked each other. Some people are destined to be obese, and it is very, very hard for them to slim down. So get over it, she seems to be saying.

And it continues to work here, in a female version of 500,000 male buddy-cop movies we’ve seen, where they start out hating each other and then grow into respect and then friendship. MM is the in-your-face, tough Boston street cop who thinks nothing of chasing a drug dealer through back yards and over chain-link fences, then sitting on him to keep him quiet. Sandra Bullock is good as the foil, the buttoned-up FBI agent on the make, with her perfect tailoring and haughty manner. All the other agents hate her, not because she is so good—which she is—but because she is so smug about it. MM soon cuts her down to size.

There is all the standard stuff you have come to expect from movies like this, including the two of them getting drunk together, but it seems at least a little bit fresh because it’s girls and not guys. It’s a long way from the best comedy of the year, but I had a good time. The scene everyone will remember is the one where MM plays Russian roulette with a tough bad guy’s balls (“You theenk you make me talk? Hah!”) … and soon has him singing at the top of his lungs. And later the payoff, where Sandra Bullock actually does … well, it’s funny.