'Hot Pursuit' review, starring Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara and Jim Gaffigan

If it wasn’t so banal, I’d feel more inspired to poke fun at how a comedy as sterile as Hot Pursuit could feel entailed enough to be released with such a blazing title. But its endlessly meandering and dull storytelling makes even recounting this feature a haggard affair. For a film that’s a mere 87 minutes long, that’s quite an accomplishment.

By-the-books cop — in more ways than one — Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) lives constantly in her fellow police officer father’s shadow, and works hard to stay committed to the law and moral integrity in her life in-and-out of the office. Although an incident involving the mayor's son and a misunderstand of the word shotgun's double meaning keeps her low on the station totem pole — where her peers have made her name synonymous with messing up on the job.

Cooper remains hard-willed and hard working, however, and is rewarded for such efforts when partnered with Detective Jackson (Richard T. Jones) to help a dangerous couple Felipe (Vincent Laresca) and Daniella Riva (Sofia Vergara) be escorted out of their house and into the witness protection program. But as the bullets fly and a body count soon builds up, Daniella and Cooper end up together on the run as a pair of considered fugitives. In their efforts to remain unseen and to have their names cleared through Cooper’s higher-up, Captain Emmett (John Carroll Lynch), the oddball pairing, of course, grow fond of each other as they make their way through their state, meet a couple of gun-wielding characters and even find themselves inside the skin of a certain outdoors animal.

Hot Pursuit is a decidedly dumb, routine buddy movie. It means well, and it has a clear-headed desire to appease as a breezy, air-conditioned slice of entertainment. Such ambitions would be noble were they not so gratingly inactive. Its need to stay close-guarded to genre conventions and tired comedy tropes is aggravating on its own. That it is so plainly written and aggressively schlocky thanks to sitcom scribes David Feeney (New Girl, 2 Broke Girls) and John Quaintance (Joey) — who compose a movie entirely on broad set-ups, unearned emotional beats and directionless comedy banter — makes the picture all-the-more pulseless and brittle.

Nothing rings true for Hot Pursuit, though this is not part of the filmmakers' intentions. It takes no risks, but these modest expectations are so calculated that the movie can’t become amusing or even enjoyably watchable. Moreover, no character feels authentic and/or likable, as they all come across like caricatures. They either are mere placeholders for the main characters’ progression or are simply loud, listless stock personas expected to please the masses solely on their funny accents.

Vergara rides on her typical shtick, and fails to offer anything she hasn’t already provided on Modern Family or in her other supporting turns of late. In fact, as the screeching, stubborn foil to Cooper who spends the whole movie complaining and yelling in both English and Spanish, she is so often belittled to her worst on-screen qualities. At the very least, however, she’s not around to just look good in a dress — as she can very often be denigrated to. If Hot Pursuit demonstrates anything, however, it’s that her charisma is growing old, fast. If this is all she can provide to the screen, her 15-minutes may wrap even before her ABC tenure comes to a close.

Witherspoon, on the other hand, tries her hardest to make this movie click. But the material at hand gives her little more to do than to prattle on endlessly with a thick Texan accent. Jokes are made about her height, but they grow stale quick. Comments are very often made about her so-called unappealing looks, but these don’t land either because make zero sense, even in this exaggerated world. Even in the filmmakers' lazy efforts to make her look more humble with a ponytail, she's still a gorgeous woman, and such remarks fail to land because they're not only unbelievable but straight-up untrue.

What makes the performance embarrassing is what it follows. After such a powerful turn as the producer/star of last year’s Wild, for the Oscar-winning actress to go to such shiftless comedy seems so degrading. Witherspoon often is only as good as her material, and when she is given no material to work with in Hot Pursuit, she must make do with whatever she can possibly do to make her movie float. She can’t even coast on chemistry, as her and Vergara don’t bounce off each other well and it never feels genuine when they bound. It doesn’t help how they are reduced to yelling at each other for the shortened running time, or how the filmmakers force such petty and rushed resolutions on their part, however.

Director Anne Fletcher hasn’t had a good film to her name yet. However, beyond the forgettable 27 Dresses, she’s proven herself capable of mediocre but affectionately felt efforts like the first Step Up movie, The Proposal and The Guilt Trip. With Hot Pursuit, however, the choreographer-turned-filmmaker appears to have little affections or care for what she can create from her performers, as she either strips the actors down to playing the simplest of characters or doesn’t feel bothered to make the movie have any more enthusiasm. Talented supporting players like Lynch, Mike Birbiglia and Jim Gaffigan are wasted completely, and the action are too half-strung to give her action-comedy any pulp. There’s no care or affection to be had here, and its falsely rung attempts at heart don’t mean anything because the people involved could care less what happens beyond the beats of the genre.

Hot Pursuit is a completely laughless affair. It never comes together, and while it never is in extremely poor tastes or overly mean-spirited, that it aims so low and expects its audience to enjoy themselves solely on the most meager level of entertainment is all the more insulting. It would have felt outdated decades ago, and this writing is below even mid-‘90s Witherspoon. To impose such a film now makes it seem all the more sluggish and aggravating, and even on its own terms it fires blanks. Fletcher’s movie wants to be a full-throttle comedy, but it burns out before it even makes it to the frontline.