Released: May 8th,
2015
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sofía Vergara
Directed by: Anne Fletcher
Written by: David Feeney, John Quaintance
Personal Bias Alert: dislikes sexism, saw the trailer several times in theaters and heard
people audibly grumble in response
3.1 of 10
The
saddest part of seeing Hot Pursuit (and
yes, there’s many sad parts to this attempted comedy) is when you’re sitting in
your seat not laughing and it dawns on you just how many people must’ve thought
this film was a good idea. They got an
experienced director, a healthy $35 million budget, a strong supporting cast,
and two leads with robust careers. How,
you ask? That question, like many other
things in life, will likely remain a mystery until the day you die.
Okay,
let’s take a step back. This movie isn’t
bad enough to start contemplating your own death. Reese Witherspoon as an uptight cop trying to
protect Sofía Vergara’s cartel-targeted witness at least gives us two game
performers, with Witherspoon and Vergara throwing their backs into every lazy
joke and sight gag that this film tries to pass off as comedy, and they succeed
in making it an endurable hour and a half.
With less committed leads, this film could’ve become downright hateful,
an abomination to the eyes and ears of those tricked into seeing it. With them, it almost succeeds at being an
innocuously unfunny distraction. Almost.
Letting
down the two leads is pretty much everything surrounding them, with the bulk of
the failure falling on writers David Feeney and John Quaintance. Both make their living as sitcom writers, and
not for the smart comedies that edged into the market in the ‘00s. Nope, these guys write for dull,
setup-punchline machines like Joey, 2
Broke Girls, and According to Jim. For the sake of yuks, let’s compare the low
bar that these shows set for themselves to Hot
Pursuit. Does the film complete this
hurdle? No, it trips during the approach
and face plants into the track. Its
characters aren’t likable, its jokes aren’t based on any sort of reality
(there’s a running gag about Witherspoon’s character having a mustache, which
she never has), and the audience may as well be crickets considering the amount
of times I heard anyone laugh. The
script is best described as sophomoric, attempting to apply the odd couple
formula to an action-comedy and update it by putting two females in the
leads. Instead, its tired setup lays
there like a slug, and the presence of females only encourages a vague sense of
misogyny. It’s clear from the beginning
that we shouldn’t expect much from the women in this film, and when they do
pull off anything it should be treated as something approaching a miracle. The fact that this conceit still exists in
the time of Leslie Knope, Katniss Everdeen, or even Witherspoon’s own Cheryl
Strayed is just plain disheartening.
In
discussing how director Anne Fletcher let down her leads, I would again like to
point out that this film had a $35 million budget. I can only imagine that it sunk that money
into its sporadic action sequences, because everything else looks like
crap. The laziness that went into the
shot setup here is epic, featuring an opening foot pursuit staged so poorly
that the actors appear to be stumbling instead of running and an entire scene
set in the bed of a truck that’s supposed to be on the road but wasn’t given
enough fake wind to even blow Vergara’s loose hair. The fact that Fletcher couldn’t even make the
film look passably realistic, which is a very basic part of the director’s job,
should indicate how badly she failed at more complex tasks like constructing
comedic timing and imbuing any sort of tone.
With
all this failure surrounding them, it’s shocking that Witherspoon and Vergara
manage the three or four laughs they do get.
How they were brought on in the first place is beyond me, and the fact
that people will spend their precious time seeing this film is just sad.
Other
Notes:
Ø They
couldn’t even get the runtime to 90 minutes.
Ø Matthew
Del Negro is a discount Matthew McConaughey.
Ø How
does this exist?
No comments:
Post a Comment