Time: 87 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence and Sexual References
Cast:
Reese Witherspoon as Cooper
Sofía Vergara as Daniella Riva
Director: Anne Fletcher

Straight-arrow policewoman Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) is excited and thrilled about her next assignment. Her task is to escort Daniella Riva (Sofía Vergara), a wisecracking Colombian beauty, from San Antonio to Dallas so both she and her husband can testify against a drug lord. Plans go awry when Mr. Riva gets ambushed, leaving Daniella a widow. Cooper and her witness must now use their wits to escape from crooked cops and murderous gunmen, while not killing each other in the process.

I’ll just get this out of the way, I haven’t regretted seeing a movie this much since Fifty Shades of Grey. As you can probably tell, my reason for reviewing this movie was because it was called one of the worst of 2015 and I’m currently catching up on everything  that came out last year, like with Fifty Shades of Grey I regretted watching it. Despite its two very talented and credible leads, they have nothing to do in this movie, with horrible writing, unfunny humour and terrible direction. Nothing in this movie works, there really is no reason to watch this movie.

Right out the gate I’ll say that Hot Pursuit was a worse 2015 comedy than Unfinished Business, not one joke worked. From the very beginning the film didn’t work and it only got worse when Sofia Vergara is brought in, it goes directly from being unfunny to painfully obnoxious. As the film moves along, it somehow gets even worse, with the humour becoming more annoying, forced and at times embarrassing. It only took me 15 minutes for me to hate this movie. This movie’s level of ‘comedy’ can be summed up in one scene: to get Reese Witherspoon out of a situation after being caught trying to look through someone else’s car, Sofia Vergara comes in and acts like her lesbian lover and starts trying to kiss her and it’s all done in an intentionally very awkward way. In the second half of the movie it actually tries to be serious and it doesn’t work because the audience doesn’t even care about what’s going on. The only thing I can thank this movie for is the fact that it’s less than 90 minutes but that’s hardly a compliment.

Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara are very talented and have been great in comedies. Here though, they have no chemistry and have nothing to work with. Both of them are annoying, whether it be their voices (not the accent, the way they are directed to speak) or the choices that the characters make. Their interactions together drive the movie, and unfortunately that’s where it has the worst moments. It doesn’t help that their characters aren’t really that different from one another, so they can’t really play off each other. Both Witherspoon and Vergara have charisma and can play each other well, look at the bloopers in the end credits, it was much funnier than any line delivered in the actual movie, and both actresses interacted well together. It’s just that the movie gave them horrendous material to work with.

Hot Pursuit is a hot mess in every sense of the word, the performances were annoying, the writing was worse, the comedy was even worse than that. I don’t know how they managed to get two credible actresses on board with this movie. This movie has absolutely no redeeming element whatsoever and if you are one of the few people that this movie interests, I’d recommend not watching it. I know this movie isn’t supposed to be for me, after watching it though, I can’t see this movie being for anyone.