( EW.com ) -- A comedian who did n't risk looking foolish would n't even be in the game . In `` The Heat , '' which has the scruffy honor of being the first female buddy-cop action comedy , Melissa McCarthy does more than risk looking foolish â€ ” she risks coming off as borderline insane , like a dissolute biker -- turned -- homeless person , like she 's royally out of control . Is it any wonder that she shocks the audience into laughter in more scenes than not ? With her naughty-angel features , and her italicized gumption that 's so stylized it turns sarcasm into a blunt-witted form of sincerity , McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins , a proudly slobby lethal weapon of a Boston police detective who favors fingerless leather gloves , keeps an arsenal of firearms ( including a rocket launcher ) in her refrigerator , and doles out cut-to-the-quick insults the way that most of us say `` Hello ! '' Movies : 10 All-Time Greatest . Mullins gets paired with her opposite number : Sarah Ashburn ( Sandra Bullock ) , an uptight , by-the-book FBI agent in ugly off-the-rack pants suits . Ashburn may be great at catching criminals , but she 's so smug about it that she drives even her FBI boss ( Demian Bichir ) crazy . The laws of the buddy-cop comedy are as basic , familiar and inviolable as the rules of checkers . A pair of law enforcers get yoked together , and they do n't pretend to like each other . One is a tut-tutting straight-arrow , the other a wild-card screw-up . And no matter how thick the jokes get , the gods of gunfire and major vehicular damage must be served . There 's no reason to think that this time-honored testosterone formula , with two actresses now planted at the center of it , would change all that much , and in `` The Heat , '' it does n't . Except in one crucial way . Funny ladies packing 'Heat : ' Not your typical buddy cop movie . The director , Paul Feig , possesses a highly developed radar for the alternating currents of competition and camaraderie in female relationships . As he proved in `` Bridesmaids '' ( 2011 ) , the one other major film he 's directed , Feig understands how women who do n't like each other express their antipathy â€ ” in ways both more direct and less direct than what men do . In `` The Heat , '' Feig stages scenes like Richard Donner ( `` Lethal Weapon '' ) with a touch of George Cukor ( `` The Women '' ) . He has made a piece of smash-and-grab policier pulp that , through the interplay of Bullock and McCarthy , spins to its own snarly/confessional feminine beat . Movie Style : 20 All-Time Greatest . There 's a very funny scene in which Ashburn and Mullins , who have teamed up to nab a drug lord , go undercover at a dance club , where Mullins tries to transform Ashburn 's `` bank teller '' outfit into something halfway clubby . She rips off Ashburn 's sleeves , then her pant legs , revealing a pair of Spanx . Yet even as Mullins is shredding her partner 's clothes and shredding her ego even more , her hilarious lack of mercy comes off as a version of sisterly compassion . Forget the mid-level dealer whose phone they 're out to bug . She 's trying to save this poor woman from herself . Ashburn 's problem is that she 's all head and no instinct , a kind of Quantico-trained robot ; she does n't know how to bond . McCarthy plays Mullins ' repugnance at her partner 's inhuman professionalism with a cringing spontaneity , as when she puts up her hand for a high five , and Ashburn has to go and wreck it by slapping and then clasping that hand . ( It 's far from the only time in the movie when Mullins looks like she wants to throw up , a motif you would not see in a male buddy comedy . ) As long as these two are at loggerheads , `` The Heat '' has a catchy , lock-and-load hostility . It 's much more clever than , say , the two `` Bad Boys '' films , and less cartoonish than either the `` Rush Hour '' movies or the `` Lethal Weapon '' sequels ( though not `` Lethal Weapon '' itself ) . With Bullock doing a variation on her `` Miss Congeniality '' geek-tomboy-who-has-to-bloom character , and McCarthy letting her acidly oddball observations rip , the two actresses make their interplay bubble . When Mullins confuses Ashburn 's overly fussy pair of pajamas with a tuxedo , it 's all wrong , yet somehow right . And when the partners go to an old man 's bar and do shots all night , dancing to Deee-Lite 's `` Groove Is In the Heart , '' the drunken craziness is infectious enough to make you want to join them . But once these two get to be friends , the comic tension dissipates , and the film 's boilerplate drug-dealer plot takes over and goes on and on . `` The Heat '' is fresher than a lot of the male-centric movies it takes off from , because there 's little about aggressive guy banter that has n't been worn to the ground by Hollywood . You can tell how much the times have changed when Ashburn gets an oyster-shucking knife stuck in her thigh , then pulled out , then shoved back , or when she performs a graphic emergency tracheotomy â€ ” and the blood-gushing grossness is , in every sense , a gag . It 's genuinely jolting ( in a way that , I suspect , may prove highly commercial ) to see women go through these motions . But the motions are still market-tested and machine-tooled . Even when they 're channeling the happy madness of Melissa McCarthy . Grade : B . See the original story at EW.com . CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . © 2011 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy co-star in `` The Heat '' Directed by Paul Feig , it 's the first female buddy cop action comedy . The duo work best when their characters are n't friends . Comment: