The Bridesmaids dream team – director Paul Feig and star Melissa McCarthy – deliver this year's sweariest comedy, with Oscar winner Sandra Bullock in tow.
You can’t argue with the chemistry as Bullock gets prissy and McCarthy gets potty-mouthed. Imagine Cagney & Lacey with no filters and no manners.
As Scorsese realised with The Departed and Seth MacFarlane knew for Ted, there's something delightful about curse words delivered in a deep Bostonian brogue. McCarthy, here essaying a maverick cop, has seldom seemed so desperately in want of an oral overhaul with soap and water.
Keeping pace with most male buddy team-ups, there's a decidedly Sapphic undercurrent when uptight FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) is, against her wishes, paired up with local cop Shannon Mullins (McCarthy). Their target is a drugs ring. Their potential pigeon is Mullins's brother (Michael Rapaport), a nogoodnik ex-jailbird, having been charged by his own sister. Scenes of drunkenness and loud familial discord ensue.
The Bullock-McCarthy partnership is a lively, lovely alchemy to behold. Both women affect variations on their Greatest Hits back catalogue: Bullock is easily shocked and McCarthy is endlessly shocking. Their comic rhythms are familiar, but they serve the material well.
The most commendable thing about Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold's first screenplay, however, is that it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours. Under the many layers of cusswords and antics, this is a film about female friendships, about women working twice as hard as men to get nowhere in particular and about the unpopularity of professional women in the workplace.
Ashburn’s perfectionism is deemed annoying and undesirable, just as Mullin’s rebellious tendencies are deemed annoying and undesirable. Jane Curtin’s hardcore matriarch provides the cherry on top.
