Why Is "The Heat" Still the Only Female Buddy-Cop Movie?

Ten years ago this month, "The Heat" (available to stream on Max) upended longstanding notions of what a buddy-cop comedy could be. The Paul Feig-directed movie was a new spin on an old formula: two women playing an odd-couple pair of detectives, forced to team up on a case.

Given the incredible popularity of the genre throughout the decades, it's surprising it took this long for someone to rethink it with a gender flip. There are few female comic actors better suited to the task than Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, who collectively have been creating an entire body of work sending up classic movies (see McCarthy in Feig's "Spy" and Bullock in "The Lost City," just for starters) but had never costarred before this.

The commonly accepted buddy-cop playbook is: Take one uptight, by-the-book law enforcement agent and pair him with a plays-by-his-own-rules loose cannon. Add a dangerous crime plot to foil, and voila: you've got action-comedy magic. In most such movies of yore, though, women are relegated to playing a dutiful or scolding wife or colleague. Not so with the "Heat" screenplay, written by "Parks and Recreation" alum Katie Dippold. She told The Guardian that she was inspired by classics of the genre like "Lethal Weapon," "48 Hours," and "Running Scared" but that she'd been thinking about how often female characters are shoehorned into romantic plotlines rather than comedic ones. She was surprised to find the studio so supportive of her concept. "Interestingly, I thought it would be much harder than it was. I felt that, for this movie to be made, there would have to be a rewrite — like, one of them had to get married in the middle — but it was never forced on us," she said.

The two leads are masters of very different schools of comedy. There's Bullock, who's long honed her onscreen facility with uptight, nerdy characters who resist the trappings of traditional femininity ("Miss Congeniality," anyone?) and eventually make their peace with some chaotic new presence in their lives ("The Lost City"). McCarthy, meanwhile, is a freewheeling, one-woman force of personality known for her profane, hilarious riffing ("Bridesmaids," "This Is 40," "The Boss").

In "The Heat," Bullock is pitch-perfect as Ashburn, the by-the-book FBI agent known for annoying her colleagues with excruciating, humorless adherence to protocol. McCarthy is Mullins, a rule-skirting Boston cop who thinks nothing of roughing up suspects or making fun of her boss in front of the entire office. Both actors are terrific physical comedians, and their onscreen pairing makes you wonder why they haven't been working together for years. Exhibit A: the scene in which Mullins drastically alters Ashburn's no-nonsense wardrobe when they're undercover at a nightclub, culminating in Mullins's horror and bewilderment at Ashburn's shapewear.

Feig taps into one popular cop-movie trope by setting "The Heat" in Boston, where McCarthy's Mullins has a reunion with her big Southie family, most of whom are still mad at her for putting her drug-dealing brother (Michael Rapaport) behind bars. As anyone who's seen "The Departed" or "The Town" or "Mystic River" can attest, Boston accents are a cinematic thing. And in a scene where Bullock's character is left on her own with the family, this movie gleefully sends it up with an interrogation of the very confused Ashburn about whether she's a narc, pronounced by the family — including in the subtitles! — as "knock." Another running theme in "The Heat" is a nod at the trope of the chaotic cop being absolutely irresistible to women. Here, McCarthy's slovenly, f-bomb-dropping Mullins leaves a string of lovestruck, one-night-stand men in her wake. Most amusingly, one's played by McCarthy's real-life husband and frequent moviemaking partner, Ben Falcone. Crucially, "The Heat" never wanders into lazy gender stereotypes; its one concession to its two leads being women is, perhaps, the scene in which they dangle a suspect over a balcony but then gradually lose their grip because he's too heavy, dropping him unceremoniously (but not fatally) onto his own car.

By all rights, "The Heat" should have spawned a sequel or two and a bevy of other female buddy-cop movies. So where are they? According to one 2022 study, women are still substantially outnumbered by men on the big screen. But there are plenty of other worthy contenders who could take this nascent subgenre and run with it (may we suggest Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant?). Your move, Hollywood.

In the meantime, "The Heat" holds up on repeated viewings as the best — and only! — film in its class.

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