Movie Review: 'Hot Pursuit'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - It was originally called Don't Mess with Texas, the slogan of an anti-littering advertising campaign by the Texas Department of Transportation.
Well, that might have made a more appropriate title than Hot Pursuit because this mess of a movie is about as close to litter as movies get.
It's an action comedy pairing Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara, each of whom also served as a producer on the project.
But neither of the leads comes off very well, they barely bond in any satisfying way, and we're left to remember better work each has done elsewhere.
Like lots of comedy teams down through the years, Reese and Sofia, with their contrasting body types, are a walking sight gag.
Come to think of it, not only their bodies but their bodies of work are a vivid contrast as well.
But unlike most of those comedy teams, they're just not funny -- at least, not in this vehicle.
Reese Witherspoon has been a film actress since she was 15 years old (The Man in the Moon). Since, she's appeared in dozens of movies in parts big and small, has an Oscar (Walk the Line) as well as a second nomination (Wild), an indelible performance as Tracy Flick in Election, and two iconic, influential, and lucrative Legally Blonde flicks under her belt.
Sofia Vergara, on the other hand, has been in only a handful of movies and has instead established her persona and popularity on the basis of her easy-to-underestimate-but-difficult-to-ignore ensemble role in the television sitcom, Modern Family.
In Hot Pursuit, Witherspoon plays an obsessive-compulsive, by-the-book Texas cop, disgraced at one point and assigned to the evidence desk. But she gets a reprieve and is assigned to protect the curvaceous, vivacious widow of a drug kingpin, played by Vergara, both from murderous criminals and from crooked cops as she escorts her from San Antonio to Dallas so she can appear, reluctantly, as a witness to testify against the drug dealer.
You get the sense that both Witherspoon and Vergara are attempting in good faith to build characters of more than one dimension who resonate as they entertain and make us laugh without insulting us. But neither the material nor their handlers will allow it.
Director Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses, The Proposal, The Guilt Trip), saddled with an often-nonsensical script by David Feeney and John Quaintance that reads like a tentative first draft, directs her two stars to shrill, repetitive caricatures and mounts both action and slapstick sequences with awkward and painful obviousness: just about every joke or gag qualifies as low-hanging fruit.
So we'll team up with 1-1/2 stars out of 4 for the messy mismatched-buddies road romp, Hot Pursuit. There's certainly more than enough pursuit, but this one's trivial and leaves us cold.