“You just got Coopered!”
Directed by: Anne Fletcher
Writers: David Feeney, John Quaintance
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Sofía Vergara, Robert Kazinsky, John Carroll Lynch
Swift shot: With a comedy duo, timing and chemistry is everything. At first glance, Hot Pursuit is really just a goofy, forgettable cop caper, but it did bust my gut a few times. For some reason, I kept thinking of David Spade and Chris Farley, only David Spade has bigger boobs and Sofia Vergara really pulled off a nice “fat man in a little coat,” if you know what I’m sayin’. Hot Pursuit will probably not leave much of an impact on the pop-culture crazed annals of cinema, but I did appreciate a few of the one-liners, and it got me out of a shitty mood. For a comedy, that’s a win. I was entertained.
Officer Cooper (Witherspoon) was nursed on police protocol; she literally grew up in the back of a police cruiser. Her dad was a legend in the force, but she is a glorified secretary now, working in the evidence room of a San Antonio squad. Her fellow officers delight in reminding her she is an insignificant speck of dirt. But, her Captain (John Carroll Lynch) has a soft spot for Cooper and finally has a job back out in the field. Thanks to some law, whenever a female is being escorted, a female officer must be present during transport. Sounds sexist to me, but what do I know?
That’s when Cooper meets Mrs. Riva (Vergara) who is the wife of a would-be cartel rat, Felipe. Felipe is planning on testifying in Dallas against a cartel boss and then hidden by witness protection. That’s the plan, and of course everything goes horribly wrong. He is slaughtered in his living room. This is a comedy, after all. My kind of comedy, I might add.
Quickly, Cooper and Riva find themselves fleeing for their lives from not one, but two separate groups of gunmen that have riddled the Riva’s home with lead. Mrs. Riva (as she is constantly called by Cooper) insists on bringing one large bag with her as they barely manage to escape the shooters. Cooper, in a panic, reverts to her police training and reminded me of Joe Friday in Dragnet spouting out police codes and regulations just about every-time she opened her impish mouth . While Riva is as stereotypical a character as you can create in a live-action flick, she’s a cartel wife, period.
So, you should have a straight-man and a zany nut-ball to play off of, and at first the chemistry between the two was just not there. But, maybe that’s to be expected, in a lot of these films the chemistry starts off at inception, but in reality, it wouldn’t work like that, anyway. So, as the film progresses, the two develop a kind of comedic covalent bond.
While fleeing from the cartel shooters, and fellow LEOs, the two sappy skirts have to work together to survive and manage to provide some solid laughs as they evade peril and grow as characters. Cooper definitely has a lot of room for growth . . . sorry Reese, couldn’t resist. And Riva has some shiny tricks in her bag that keep things interesting.
There is violence, there is sexual innuendo, there is drug use and foul language. Hell, it was almost like an ’80s flick, come to think about it. It made me laugh, will it make you laugh? I can’t say, but I can tell you that I set the bar galactically low for Hot Pursuit, and it managed to surpass that level.
