Hot Pursuit fails to amuse despite its strong cast and director

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This article was published 07/05/2015 (4171 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The movie Hot Pursuit is hilarious.

On paper.

It has a buddy-movie plot conjoining elements of Thelma and Louise and Midnight Run. It has a fairly solid director in Anne Fletcher, who dared to bitch-ify Sandra Bullock to rewarding comic effect in The Proposal. It has Modern Family lollapalooza Sofia Vergara as the widow of a drug-cartel lieutenant on the run from her hubby’s brutal kingpin boss.

Best of all, it has Reese Witherspoon as an exacting, snippy miss cut from the same cloth as her high school student-council nominee in Election, which is, in case you missed it, only one of the most sublime comedic performances of the ’90s.

Here, Witherspoon is Rose Cooper, a San Antonio cop who, as we see in the film’s opening montage, is a cop’s daughter who has been riding in a police vehicle since she was an infant, playing with handcuffs like most babies would play with a set of keys.

As an adult, Cooper’s bumbling ways have landed her in a clerical job, subject to patronizing comments from her male peers.

She is offered a chance to redeem herself by helping escort a drug lord and his wife to Dallas to testify against Teflon drug don Vincente Cortez (Joaquin Cosio).

But some mob assassins scuttle that plan, leaving the antagonistic, newly widowed Daniella Riva (Vergara) in Cooper’s custody.

Again, their forced flight should be funny, but laugh-wise, nothing lands. The script by David Feeney and John Quaintance is as patronizing as just about all the male characters, especially in the late addition of a gratuitous romantic interest for Cooper in the person of a charismatic felon named Randy (Robert Kazinsky).

The Mutt-and-Jeff dynamic between the diminutive Witherspoon and the formidable Vergara is only sporadically funny, and only visually. Their comic chemistry is off. There should be a volcano-producing, baking-soda-and-vinegar reaction between these two, but more often, it’s like baking soda and water.

Possibly, that’s because both are expected to be equally funny, and that subverts the more reliable clown/straight man formula.

Witherspoon ends up doing most of the comedic heavy lifting, leaving us to wonder who would look at the sexy, Muppet-mouthed Vergara and say: “There’s our second banana!”

The movie’s best bits are the end-credit outtakes, which leaves us to the disheartening conclusion the cast had a better time making this movie than we had watching it.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca