How do you know a comedy when you see one? It’s supposed to make you laugh, right? By that definition Hot Pursuit, the latest in a long line of “two opposite personalities are forced to take a road trip together” movies, doesn’t fall into that category. Like the recent The Gallows for horror, what did us poor, unsuspecting moviegoers do to deserve a film like this?
The plot follows uptight, by-the-book cop Officer Rose Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) who has been kept off street duty due to an unfortunate incident sometime prior. But one day she gets the opportunity to get back out in the field when her boss assigns her to escort and protect Danielle Riva (Sofia Vergara), the outspoken wife of a federal witness who is going to testify against a Mexican cartel boss. Things go wrong when Cooper and her partner go to pick up the informants and so she and Danielle are forced on the run with both criminals and corrupt cops on their tail.
What follows is a series of simultaneously clichéd and painfully unfunny episodes that feel like half-assed YouTube comedy sketches that just happen to have big name actors in them and just happen to have found their way into cinemas. All the categories are covered that you’d expect, from Witherspoon’s height and sticking to the rules at all costs to Vergara’s strong accent and her character’s obsession with dragging shoes everywhere. There are badly directed shootouts, double-crosses, disguises, lesbian and menstruation jokes. Even the old “handcuffed to the prisoner” gag gets dragged out.
It’s like director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses, The Guilt Trip) and screenwriters David Feeney and John Quaintance don’t realise just how many mis-matched buddy movies there have been and are content with throwing the entire book of clichés at us and expecting us to chortle at them for the privilege. The idea of pitting two opposite personalities against one another isn’t exactly fresh but that’s not the real issue; there are plenty of comedies that still employ that conceit and manage to make it work. No, the issue here is just how relentlessly, depressingly unfunny it manages to be despite it’s best efforts of firing out so-called jokes at a pretty consistent rate. If you look closely at any given moment there’s a tumbleweed blowing past.
Witherspoon has proved in the past with the likes of Legally Blonde that she can do comedy well, and Vergara has won numerous deserving Emmys for her role on TV’s Modern Family, where good writing compliments the persona. But they have a underdeveloped characters to work with here; Witherspoon is little more than a strong Texan accent and a half-baked height joke, while Vergara simply takes her over-the-top Latin persona to shrill new heights. They are extremely hard to like or care about, spouting words that vaguely resemble jokes but woefully miss the target on just about every occasion. It covers a lot of the same ground as Paul Feig’s The Heat but there Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy had material with a little bite to it to work with, this feels like a lifeless, wimpier attempt at doing the same thing.
Even if a comedy lacks in the laugh department overall, it at least gives you five or six decent giggles then it’s just about done its job. Unfortunately Hot Pursuit does nothing of the sort, providing an obnoxious, loud, shockingly laugh-free experience from beginning to end, wasting the talents of its two leads who are clearly just there to pick up the hefty paycheque and setting what feels like a new record for most comedy/cop movie clichés done in a non-spoof movie. It doesn’t do anything to offend on a moral level but for those that expect comedies to be funny – and that would be everyone – it’s equally unpleasant.
