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Saturday 8 March 2014

"The Heat" on BLU RAY - A Review Of The 2013 Comedy.

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“You want something to eat? I got a Subway I bought last week...” - The Heat on BLU RAY

"The Heat" is Starsky and Hutch for Girls. It also hankers back to those wiseass buddy-buddy movies of the Seventies where everyone is a "perp" or a "narc" or a "douchebag" - and cops keeping the mean streets free of drugs are all heart, gut instinct and no procedure. Throw in an FBI Captain (Demian Bichir) and a Boston Police Chief (a fabulous turn by Thomas Wilson) who are antagonistic and put upon and you get the picture. 

What makes "The Heat" so enjoyable is just that – it’s 'so' enjoyable. And I mean the whole way through. You can’t help but think that both Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy had an absolute blast making this. And there’s that rare thing between them too – a genuine oddball chemistry that shouldn’t be there but is. These are two great actresses at the top of their game - making it look easy.

Bullock is Ashburn – a snooty rubs-everyone-up-the-wrong-way career-obsessed FBI agent who dresses in immaculate suits and has a way with closing cases that annoys the men in the Bureau (even the sniffer dogs don’t like her). McCarthy plays Mullins – a bedraggled foul-mouthed drug-busting Boston Street cop whose hair was last groomed in 1972 and wears the same teeshirt for six days in a row in her beat up car.  One is all rules and regulations and by the book – while the other is more likely the use the Telephone Book as a weapon during interrogation (her fridge is full of revolvers and rocket launchers instead of food). Bullock about McCarthy as she turns over her Captain’s office: “What’s she doing? Captain: She’s looking for my balls…” There then follows a McCarthy tirade of insults to the whole office about the mediocre size of his appendages that will have you howling with laughter.

Both are unwillingly assigned to a pusher called "Larkin" who has eluded the Boston Police forever. Mullins also has to contend with her estranged crazy family and her kid brother Jason (Michael Rappaport) whom ‘she’ put in jail for dealing. Jason is a good kid (she was trying to protect him from addiction) – but just out of jail - maybe he’s tempted to go back to the wrong crowd again. And on it goes to Ashburn with a knife wound in her knee crawling through hospital corridors to save her partner’s kin…

As you can imagine – most of the crudity – vagina and dick jokes – barroom hijinks – hanging drug-dealers over fire escapes – personal hygiene gags and non-stop laughs is provided by McCarthy - who probably spouts more good one-liners in “The Heat” than there’s been in all 50 of Woody Allen’s movies. “I used to be married you know” says Bullock as they get hammered on shots in a dive bar (a really funny set piece) – McCarthy replies “What! To a hearing man!” The jokes are all like this and Director Mike Feig keeps you giggling at them - all the time.

The BLU RAY picture quality is immaculate throughout – defaulted to 2.40 (bars top and bottom of the screen) – but even stretched to full aspect – it looks amazing – a proper Hollywood blockbuster set of production values.

There are two cuts of the movie – “Theatrical” and “Extended” and as you can imagine the outtakes in the huge amount of Extras go on for hours and generously feature a lot of the seriously talented supporting cast:

1.         Director and Cast Commentary
2.         Mullins Family Fun
3.         Acting Master Class
4.         Let’s Get Physical
5.         Police Brutality
6.         Von Bloopers
7.         Supporting Cast Cavalcade
8.         Over And Out
9.         And Stuff We Had To Leave Out But Still Think Is Funny
10.       How The Heat Was Made

AUDIO: English 51. DTS-HD Master Audio, English Description Audio Dolby Digital 5.1, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian DTS 5.1.

SUBTITLES: English For The Deaf and Hard Of Hearing, French, Spanish (Castellano), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Estonian Latvian, Arabic, Chinese and Turkish.

“The Heat” is far more fun than it had any divine right to be – don those sweat pants – get that flak jacket ready – and pull the pin out of those comedic grenade.


Way to go ladies…

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