If you can’t take The Heat, get out of the southewestern portion of the United States.
Genre: Buddy Cop/Comedy
Premise: An uptight FBI agent must team up with an unruly nontraditional Boston cop to take down a mysterious drug lord.
About: Writer Katie Dippold was one of the lucky ones. She sold this script last March and was in pre-production by June with director Paul Feig, who was coming off the success of Bridesmaids. Before Dippold broke onto the feature scene, she wrote for cult hit Parks & Recreation, and before that, Mad TV. Dippold has done a lot of (and still does some) improvisational comedy, most notably with the Upright Citizens Brigade. This weekend, The Heat surprised a lot of people by destroying the more male-skewing White House Down, taking in 40 million to White House Down’s 25 mil.
Writer: Katie Dippold
Details: 117 minutes long
I suppose it’s appropriate that I went to see The Heat this weekend. We’re experiencing a heat wave in Los Angeles. My new favorite script Where Angels Die is getting a lot of heat. Heat seems to be a major theme in my life right now.
But you know what’s not a major theme in my life right now? Laughing. Laughing is not a major theme during the two hour running time of The Heat. Look, I love Melissa McCarthy. I like Sandra Bullock a lot. I thought the two of them were a genius pairing. I loved the trailers. They’re what made me want to see the movie.
Which is why I’m so confused. Why is this movie so boring? I mean, it wasn’t as bad as Identity Thief. But for all the things it had going for it, it never made it out of second gear. And believe me, I know all about not making it out of second gear. Yesterday I was in the In and Out drive-thru when my car died. I’d realized I’d run out of gas but the warning alarm had never gone off to warn me of that (okay fine, that’s not true. It did go off earlier in the day and I was too lazy to get gas).
Anyway, the prospect of pushing my car through a drive-thru line was becoming a reality. And I don’t think there’s anything more pathetic-looking than having to push your car through a drive-thru line. Think about it. We go to drive-thru lines for the distinct purpose of being lazy asses. It doesn’t make sense if you all of a sudden have to start working for your food. And you want to know what really threw everything off? Monkey Style. That’s right. I had heard of a secret In and Out burger called Monkey Style, but they were telling me that Monkey Style didn’t exist.
Eventually, I was able to convince the fumes in my gas tank to give me all they had and got out of the drive-thru line in one piece. But I’m still pissed off that I didn’t get a burger Monkey Style. Clearly in this video, someone’s gotten a Monkey Style burger. Which means I should’ve been able to get one too.
What does this have to do with anything? It doesn’t. The Heat was just so average that I’d rather discuss my own life than the film. But I guess since this is a review, I have to discuss the film at some point so here’s the plot n stuff…
Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is an arrogant FBI agent who believes she’s God’s gift to crime-fighting, so much so that everyone else in her department despises her. Not to say Ashburn isn’t good at her job. She just can’t work with others. Which is fine by her. A director job just opened in her office, which means she’ll soon be the one in charge. And the one in charge doesn’t have to work with anyone.
Only hiccup is that her current boss wants to see a little more from her before he gives her the position. There’s a mysterious Boston drug dealer that no one can seem to find. If Ashburn finds him, the job’s hers. Here’s the issue though. There’s a batshit crazy local cop, Mullins (Melissa McCarthy), who considers the Boston drug beat to be hers. If Ashburn’s going to start playing on her turf, she wants in. Knowing she’s gotta prove to her boss that she can play well with others, Ashburn reluctantly accepts Mullins as a partner.
Normally I’d finish this with: “Hilarity ensues,” because why not end the most generic setup ever with the most generic comedy cliché ever? But for those who just HAVE to know the details, the investigation leads towards Mullins’ ex-con brother, who was a low-level drug dealer before Mullins threw him in jail! Her enormous opinionated Boston family (think 20 people all screaming out “cah!” at the same time) hates her for turning on her own brother, which has since caused a huge rift in the family. But it’s Mullins’ brother who eventually leads them to the real bad guy, who turns out to be someone who’s, yup, ACTUALLY one of the cops.
All right, so after writing out this synopsis, I know exactly why this script didn’t work. First of all, the story’s too generic. Dippold did a nice job injecting the buddy cop formula with some freshness via a double dose of estrogen. But I think she thought that would be enough. And it wasn’t. This storyline was as generic as a pack of Safeway q-tips, and for that reason, we never really cared if Ashburn and Mullins got their drug dealer or not.
Now you may be saying, “That doesn’t matter as long as McCarthy and Bullock get to be funny together. That’s the reason people are going to the movie.” But you’d be wrong. That works for the first 4-5 scenes we see our pair in. We’re so excited to see these two battling it out, we forget about the plot. But as soon as that excitement wears off, the audience wants a story that’s going to keep them interested. And since everything in this story was bland, we never get that. Once a reader or audience member doesn’t care about what happens, it doesn’t matter if you have two of the greatest comedians in history playing your characters. We’re bored.
The other big problem here was the lack of urgency. There was no deadline, no ticking time bomb to the investigation. They seemed to have years to solve the case if they wanted that. This approach can kill a story. If we don’t feel that catching the bad guys is imperative, then we relax. And you never want your audience to be relaxed. You want them on the edge of their seats!
This was most evident in the scene structure. Every single scene was 30% longer than it should’ve been. Dippold (or Feig) would stick around way longer than she needed to in order to get 5 or 6 more jokes in (or Melissa McCarthy zingers). I remember Feig did the same thing with Bridesmaids, which at the time I praised. That’s because Bridesmaids was a different kind of movie. Nobody was trying to capture anybody. The comedy in that script was based around a lot of the awkwardness that Kristin Wiig’s character created, which is why the long scenes worked. They exaggerated the awkwardness.
Here, we needed to feel like we were running out of time, that something terrible was going to happen if the bad guy wasn’t captured ASAP. But that was never introduced into the script. Feig probably felt like this worked in his favor. Since his characters never technically had to be anywhere, he could just play with them, let them insult each other. We have a bathroom club scene, in which Mullins dresses Ashburn, that goes on for way too long. We have a scene where they get drunk at a bar that goes on for way WAY too long. We have a scene where they visit Mullins family that goes on three minutes longer than it has to. Every scene just lingered and the combination between long scenes and a lack of a ticking time-bomb made this script feel slower than it should’ve.
So if you go see this movie and you’re wondering why it seems to be moving so slowly, this is the reason. And I’m not saying it’s a terrible movie. McCarthy and Bullock are funny enough and have enough chemistry that you remain mildly amused throughout the film. But the goal of writers and filmmakers should not be to “mildly amuse” their audience.
Now some of you might be saying, “Well hold up here, Carson. How the hell did this script sell then?” A couple of reasons. I’m always telling you guys that you want to find a fresh take on an old genre/concept. It’s one of the quickest ways to a sale. Dippold did this by creating a female buddy cop movie when we’ve only ever had male buddy cop movies. Kind of genius when you think about it. Second, Dippold’s already repped. She already has a way to get her script into directors like Feig’s hands. The unknown amateur writer doesn’t have that. For that reason, their scripts have to impress more people to get to a level where they’d be shown to Paul Feig. That script is only going to make it past those 7 or 8 people if the story in addition to the concept is there.
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Genre and subject matter will dictate the average length of scene in your script. If you’re writing a straight-forward comedy that takes place inside a house, like say, “Meet The Parents,” you’ll have more freedom to create longer scenes that play off of the awkwardness and conflict between the characters. But if you’re writing a buddy-cop comedy, where there’s a more explicit and important goal, the scenes should be shorter and contain more urgency to them.
