Hot Pursuit (12A, 92mins)
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara
Director: Anne Fletcher
RATING: 2 STARS
COMEDY misfire Hot Pursuit fails to ignite any real laughs or excitement from its tepid screwball-styled 'on the lam' antics, which involve a short uptight cop (Witherspoon) and a tall sex-bomb witness (Vergara) under her protection being chased across Texas by poisoned police and crazed criminals.
Both leads battle gamely with the feeble material they've been given, developing enough mismatched chemistry to convince us that they deserved to be in a better movie.
Indeed, the extent of your patience with Hot Pursuit's underwhelming mix of action and comedy will depend largely on your affection for Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as actors.
The latter has banked a ton of viewer goodwill thanks to her scene-stealing turn as Ed O'Neill's much younger missus Gloria in the hit sitcom Modern Family, where the Colombian former quiz show hostess has time and again demonstrated her natural talent for zippy verbal jousting and physical comedy.
Vergara's skills with the latter are tested pretty regularly in her first big feature part for Hot Pursuit, as writers David Feeney and John Quaintance contrive various ways of putting her impressively pneumatic form in all manner of compromising positions (but not so compromising as to threaten that all important, money-grabbing 12A cert, naturally) with her diminutive co-star.
Witherspoon, who hasn't really done a full-blown comedy since Legally Blonde 2 and possibly just fancied tackling something lighter again after the Oscar-nod worthy seriousness of her last big picture, Wild, throws herself into the slapsticky antics with gusto as the straight-laced Officer Cooper.
Sadly, an abundance of woman-on-woman wrestling and make-out scenes can only take a picture so far (no, really) – and Hot Pursuit's lame-brained script simply isn't good enough to pick up the slack.
When you can count the number of real laughs in a comedy film on one hand without using your thumb, you know something has gone badly wrong.
And, when some of its best moments are the goofs and gaffes in the gag reel that plays over the end credits, you can be assured that its exactly the kind of misfire for which the phrase "too little too late" was coined.
It's kind of galling to realise that the cast members had infinitely more fun while making the film than you just had watching it.
Further evidence of Hot Pursuit's half-cockedness can be detected in the uncertain tone of the Anne Fletcher-directed piece which, aside from a few tittersome menstruation-based gags and some gratuitous cleavage shots, is neither ribald enough to give Hot Pursuit a raunchy Farrelly brothers appeal, nor infused with sufficient good-natured girly charm to make it work as some sort of pre-teen buddy flick.
But perhaps the worst crime Hot Pursuit commits is to make Sofia Vergara's character Daniella so stereotypically shrill and shallow.
If you love her as the feisty, hot tempered yet warm and witty Gloria on Modern Family – and really, who doesn't – you're likely to be left stone cold by the highly irritating Spanglish-spewing Daniella, who should really have offered a funny, zesty yin to Cooper's robotic, fun-free zone yang so the pair could learn Important Lessons About Life from each other.
Instead, this bickering pair never really get past the stage of annoying each other and, by extension, the audience, until well into the third act.
Clearly, the writers misplaced their copy of Buddy Movies for Dummies. You would do well to miss Hot Pursuit altogether.
