“‘The Heat’ breaks new ground by not being groundbreaking”

Girls On Film, a weekly column at TheWeek, gets it right:

“What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest, and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?”

That’s the question at the heart of Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir’s review of last week’s Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy buddy cop comedy The Heat — a movie he derides for its depiction of “women who have internalized the vicious, macho culture of police work.” He questions the way Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) and Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) use physical threats on their quest to bring down an elusive drug dealer, and wishes that the movie had more “dramatic weight.” He says that “gross misconduct” by police officers shouldn’t be framed as funny, and thinks the film’s “high body count” should “mean something.”

Though his review frames these aspects of the film as negatives, O’Hehir’s aggrieved response to The Heat is exactly the point of The Heat: Combating the idea that having a vagina requires an entirely distinct set of behaviors and expectations than having a penis.

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The Heat strives to level the playing field and abolish the notion that women are so different than men — which makes it a window to an audience still applying gendered expectations to women behind and on the screen. O’Hehir’s discontent is not a critique of the buddy cop genre altogether; it’s the result of his expectations about how women should act within what he describes as “guy-oriented comedy.” He describes the screenplay as something “driven by a confused machismo,” and is ultimately unhappy with a film that shows evidence “that women on the screen, and behind the camera, and in the audience can be just as morally reckless as men.”

So the subtext of O’Hehir’s critique apparently is it’s not enough that women have to struggle way harder than men to get movies made with female lead characters, they also are responsible to reinvent tropes and memes. I thought that was one of the big selling points of the movie: Hey, it’s a buddy cop action comedy with all the stuff we would expect in a buddy cop action comedy… only the the two leads are women! That should be fun!

What more do you need than that simple conceit especially if you have this particular creative team (screenwriter Katie Dippold, director Paul Feig, actors Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock) at the center of the project.

Here is the simplest response to critiques like this one in Salon:

65%: That is the percentage of women who bought tickets for The Heat’s $40M opening weekend.

A-: That’s the Cinemascore rating the movie received.

$93M: That is the domestic box office total for The Heat through yesterday.

What that means is the movie found its audience. A big audience.

So “what is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest, and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?”

That is the point: Making a hit movie.

For the rest of the article, go here.

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