Ben Falcone

The meeting of McCarthy's stinging zingers and Bullock's practiced exasperation almost justifies The Heat, but it's more of a lob than a fastball.

McCarthy delivers another all-in performance, but so much so as to be more sad than funny much of the time.

Needlessly starting out on such a false, bombastic note emblematizes the film's mistake of blowing up the character past what made her recognizable, and thereby funny, in the first place.

Since Life of the Party shows little interest in investigating the satiric possibilities of the two-decade cultural gap in play, or a weirdly one-sided May-December romance, the movie wafts into disposable irrelevance long before the credits roll