After working on television series such as The Office, Weeds and Bored to Death, director Paul Feig emerged as a voice for a very particular brand of female comedy with Bridesmaids that has extended somewhat over into The Heat, but the ruse is up. Attempting to subvert status quo, Feig has executed a whitewash rebranding of the female comedy, collapsing gender norms and racial stereotypes into a generic mass so indistinct and overextending that it’ll be a miracle if he hasn’t set back the female comedy 20 years. While there are genuine moments of laugh-out-loud comedy to be had throughout, the female buddy cop angle is overdone and coated in a saccharine glaze. Top that off with a ceaseless dose of broad and overbearing comedy, a total of exactly 190 useless f-bombs and “action” situations so fantastical that the sense of stakes melts in your mouth like a filet mignon and you have a film just beating you over the head with a dead fish to the point of surrender.

Backtracking to the beginning of the story, we meet special agent Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) on a bust. She’s the leader of an FBI task force and despite her glimmering track record, she commands no respect from the troops at her disposal. Whether this general disregard stems from her being a woman or because she’s a showboating, social pariah is unclear but it seems as if there is supposed to be an air of injustice behind the lack of obedience headed her way. Either way, her character is as obnoxious as she is uptight from the get-go and the 117-minute endurance test begins.

After learning that her immediate superior (Demián Bichir) is getting bumped up, leaving a coveted upper management position within the FBI, Ashburn is told that despite of her golden girl portfolio, she is most likely going to be passed up for the promotion because, well, no one likes her. And so begins her mission to “fit in” and become a passably tolerable human being as she investigates a big profile drug case in Boston.

Over in Beantown, the top dog cop is McCarthy’s Mullins; an air sucking, f-bomb spitting mess of a woman cloaked in dirty rags and working the streets. Our first vulgarity-overboard encounter with Mullins is revealing with respect to her character. Mullins is scoping out a local prostitute ring when she spots a John just waiting to be shaken down. Tony Hale (or, as you know him, Buster from Arrested Development) only gets a minute or two on screen as The John but in that quick glimpse offers up more laughs than his starring counterpart McCarthy.

It feels impossible to point a finger in one direction or the other about the largely laugh-free nature of the first chunk of the beast as this is no cut and dry case of the script failing the actors or the actors failing the script, it’s just a combination of bad choices. The comedy at play is simply overbearing and scattershot and the performances backing it up are, for the most part, nothing short of obnoxious. McCarthy, in particular, sprays jokes like a drunken machine gun operator or a blind boxer taking swings in the dark and only hits the target ten percent of the time. Having said that, when the jokes do finally land, they muster some much needed laughs.

From the fiery conscious streaming from McCarthy’s unbound persona comes mile-a-minute vulgarity, off-the-wall asides and some genuinely funny commentary. Even Bullock managed to pull off a nice little zinger of a “tongue and cheek” pun but this is largely McCarthy’s show. Her biggest problem is she just doesn’t know when to stop.