Thursday, October 20, 2016

Hot Pursuit

Hot Pursuit; comedy, USA, 2015; D: Anne Fletcher, S: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, Robert Kazinsky

Cooper is an over-the-top ambitious, tomboyish police officer in Texas. She gets a new assignment: to pick up Felipe Riva, and his wife, Daniella, to escort them to a secret testimony against criminal Cortez, and then enlist them to the witness protection programme. However, masked assassins kill Felipe in his home, and thus Cooper and Daniella have to flee in car, since several corrupt police officers work for Cortez and want to shoot them before testimony. After a lot of adventures, Daniella tries to shoot Cortez herself on a party, and in the chaos Cooper shoots Cortez in self-defence.

"Hot Pursuit" is a perfect example of a completely average film, on all fronts. Nothing in it stands out, except maybe the good looks of Sofia Vergara, yet that is irrelevant for the storyline in question, anyway. The action chase comedy subgenre, where two unlikely people have to cooperate in order to travel to a certain place in time, often risking their lives, was done a number of times, and one of the greatest examples, "Midnight Run", simply makes "Hot Pursuit" seem pale in comparison. This film unravels as if the authors made all the events up right on the spot, without any prior inspiration or a point, leaving the impression that any 12-year old could have written this silly, flat story. There is only one inspired joke in the entire film, and it involves a running gag of the news reporting the two runaways, Cooper and Daniella, uglier and uglier in each report, the longer this pursuit is taking, as if taking revenge against them - at first, they report that the authorities are looking for a "5'1 tall police officer accompanied by a 40-year old Latin-American woman", just to in the end report that they are searching for a "4'9 tall police officer and a 50-year old Latin-American woman". Naturally, that one good gag is too little to salvage it. Ironically, the outtakes during closing credits are funnier than anything in the whole film before that. "Hot Pursuit" is a movie equivalent of a glass of water - it is so ordinary, you don't remember it in a few days at all.

Grade;+

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