reese witherspoon

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, Matthew Del Negro, Michael Mosley, and Jim Gaffigan

I find comedy to be the hardest genre of film to critique because there are never more than two ways to approach it. You either laugh or you don’t. There is no in-between. This being said, something tells me I am completely out of it when it comes to comedy. For example, even though they are looked at as our modern successful comedy blue prints, I have never consistently laughed at a Judd Apatow film. But there is one experience in recent years that told me that I will never understand why people find things funny. I still remember the screening of The Heat I attended like it was yesterday. I sat completely stone faced as Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy traded vulgar jabs…and the ENTIRE theater could not get enough, almost literally falling out of their chairs. It was one of the weirdest experiences I have ever had in a movie theater. Which leads me to Hot Pursuit. Yes it had Reese Witherspoon in comedy mode. Yes it had Sofia Vergara looking hot and showing her skills—which consist of looking hot and little else. Yet Hot Pursuit was directed by Anne Fletcher, who did a guilty pleasure of mine from a few years ago, which coincidently also starred Bullock, titled The Proposal. Could Fletcher possibly make a diamond out of the coal rock this movie looked to be from the very first trailer?

Nope. Hot Pursuit is a soulless, brainless romp which tries some offhand moral play about beauty being underneath the surface. It’s too bad the film’s writers couldn’t find a thing to make it funny or heartfelt, as jokes such as someone getting tasered because they yelled ‘shotgun’ trying to get in the front seat of a car are of the norm here. Hot Pursuit tells the story of Officer Cooper, the daughter of a late and highly respected police officer who is doing the best she can to put the respect her father earned on the back burner with antics such as the one I described above. Determined to set her name straight, Cooper volunteers to escort Daniella, the wife of a major drug lord, to Dallas so that she can testify against him. After a shootout at his mansion renders her husband dead, Cooper and Daniella end up on the run, all while being pursued by dirty cops and bad guys.

Now I have no problems with  a recycled premise as long as new exciting things are done with it. The buddy/cop storyline has been done a million times, with at least 900,000 of those being more than a little entertaining to me. But Hot Pursuit falls flat on its face. Daniella calls Cooper ‘Officer Lesbian’ as a running joke, and a way too small shirt Vergara wears with the phrase ‘Butter My Biscuits’ written across her chest is supposed to make us smile as well. It is unbearably embarrassing that Witherspoon, whose 2014 consisted of producing the David Fincher flick Gone Girl and gathering an Oscar nomination for her turn in Wild, would pick this type of easy comedy as her next project. Co-produced with Vergara, this is the Witherspoon we saw almost immediately after 2005’s Walk The Line. Someone going through the motions. And that is sad, because I saw her career going in a different, respectable direction after she took a part in 2013’s Mud, right when her career could have been derailed after an embarrassing real-life cop encounter.

The obviousness and perfunctory lameness of Hot Pursuit‘s script comes to a head in a scene where Witherspoon and Vergara kiss to distract a thug. Witherspoon’s invested involvement notwithstanding, it is confounding she would do something like this with a generic actress like Vergara. Her range is limited at best, and there are enough jokes at her thick accent’s expense to fill a 7-11 slurpee machine. The thing is they didn’t even have a hint of the onscreen chemistry needed to pull the comedy off. Neither character is compelling, and the aforementioned attempt at a message about assuming comes together when Cooper finally tells Daniella her first name. You can safely assume -oops- this scene’s emotional resonance is about as flat as a 2 day old soda.

As you can tell, I could not stand Hot Pursuit. I thought it was an awful display of lazy writing and pandering comedy. Yet all that being said, I am obviously out of it when it comes to comedy, So the movie is more than likely going to be a huge hit with packed cinemas laughing at everything I didn’t.

2 out of 10