<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Anne Fletcher. Starring Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, John Carroll Lynch, Rob Kazinsky, Richard T Jones, Michael Mosley, Matthew Del Negro, Joaquin Cosio

I overheard a fellow reviewer commenting that it’s so hard nowadays to write anything about these new movies because there’s simply nothing to them. Totally applies to Hot Pursuit, which is a poorly produced slapstick comedy that we’ve seen done a million times before.

Sure we know Reese Witherspoon is a great actress and Sofia Vergara is good at comedy. But when they’re paired up in a poorly written and horribly produced film there’s nothing much they can do to save it from crashing and burning inspite of some funny moments.

Hot Pursuit opens with an interesting montage of shots of a girl’s life in the backseat of her cop father’s squad car as he drags her along on his daily duty. Of course then you wonder what kind of father would put his daughter in that kind of dangerous situation. It’s just a quick way of showing us how young Rose Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) ended up in law enforcement as a by-the-books rookie who is a tad clumsy with her taser.

She is assigned the task of helping a Federal agent transport a drug thug and his wife Daniella (Sofia Vergara) to Dallas to testify against a ruthless drug lord (Joaquin Cosio) but things go awry and Daniella and Cooper are on the run from bad guys on both sides of the law who want them dead. There are all sorts of shouting and screaming and slapstick that ensues in this chase that seems more like a languid road trip than a hot pursuit.

Running jokes about Daniella’s age and Cooper’s height and moustache get old soon as does the horrible acting and direction. There’s a scene where the two are caught trespassing on a cowboy’s property and they pretend to be lovers and kiss unconvincingly and not at all sexy as he shoots his finger off and they think the dog ate it but it’s in Daniella’s hair and she faints. A high-school production would have been far less amateurish.

Cooper’s love interest (Rob Kazinsky) simply blows in and out with no establishment of sparks or connection. Lots and lots of plot holes abound as the girls saunter through this thankfully short (87 minutes) film trying their best to have some chemistry but even in the outtakes that are shown on the end credits you can make out it was pretty forced.

Hollywood has run out of ideas and big budgets, they have no good writers and have to fall back on books and comics to make a film now. Lets watch films from Australia now shall we; they make some decent ones like The Babadook.