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| Directed by Anne Fletcher Written by David Feeney and John Quaintance |
Objectively, there is very little reason for Hot Pursuit to exist. Warner Bros. certainly thinks so, why else would they release it one week after an Avengers sequel? But as an introduction for Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as a comedy team, it mostly does it's job.
If you can get behind the pair's manic energy, you won't mind that Hot Pursuit is a by-the-numbers road trip buddy comedy with nothing in the way of surprises or fancy technical tricks, but Witherspoon and Vergara really are a good enough pairing to make it all feel a bit more substantial than it really ought to - at least in the moment.
To wit, Reese Witherspoon plays Cooper, a high strung by-the-book San Antonio police officer charged with escorting a witness in a high profile drug case to trial. When her charge is assassinated by a rival cartel, she flees the scene with Sofia Vergara as the witness' wife and through a bit of corruption is blamed for the murder of one of her fellow officers and ends up on the lamb as she desperately tries to get her new charge to Dallas to give her testimony, and of course various hi-jinks ensue along the way.
Those hi-jinks mostly involve the two leads bickering to show off their chemistry, which is often pretty fantastic. If you like Vergara's schtick as a melodramatic, hot-tempered ethnic caricature on Modern Family, you will like her here, and Witherspoon makes a great straight-man to play off her. They really are a great comic-duo, I just wish they had a better script to be funny in.
The screenplay isn't exactly bad, far from it, it moves along at a good clip, there's no glaring plot holes or anything that insults the audience's intelligence or anything like that, but there's a significant lack of substance and very little directorial style to make up for it. That doesn't make Hot Pursuit a bad movie, just an unremarkable one. Its worth seeing for any fans of the two leads, but I'd avoid rushing out to the theater and wait for DVD or streaming.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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