Alex Reviews Hot Pursuit - Reese Witherspoon's Action Comedy Is Unfunny And Anti-Feminist

By Alex Leadbeater / August 3, 2015

Rating: ˜… Reese Witherspoon manages to undo all the career steps and feminist flag-waving she made with her Oscar-nominated turn in Wild in this criminally unfunny action comedy. Directed and produced exclusively by women, it inexplicably has no understanding of how women actually think, with a cycle of gross-out period gags and lengthy lesbian-mocking sequences that turn its slight 87 minute runtime into a gruelling endurance test. Paul Feig's incessant "Women are funny, seriously" schtick looks restrained next to this. Witherspoon is Cooper, a cop who is bad at her job because the script says she is, goddammit. She's passionate, knowledgable and serious, yet also oblivious, impersonable and incompetent. Just pick a flaw and go with it. Worse than that layered confusion though is what she goes through to sort everything out. Ostensibly Cooper must learn to be less by the book to succeed, but the real key to her eventual transformation is embracing her feminine side in the most horribly presented way possible; if she's going to be happy in life, all she needs is to dress like a woman and find a toy boy. Sickening. Sofía Vergara as the character Cooper is tasked with escorting through Texas (I can't remember what she's called and refuse to IMDb it) is just as bad, spewing a never ending tirade of Latino stereotypes that make Ant-Man's Luis look like an affectionate portrayal. Both characters are immensely unlikeable, performed with variations of heavily accented screeching and screaming, vying with Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele for the worst on-screen pair of 2015.

Outside of comedy and character, Hot Pursuit also runs into the usual problems an action comedy suffers - too much time invested on a poorly-realised narrative (plot points are raised and dropped in the same scene, only playing a part in the story if the characters on screen remember them) and action that feels like it was directed by the second unit (the most exciting things get is swerving out of the way of a car when on the wrong side of the road). A key conceit is that Cooper and Vergara's character are handcuffed together, but the script is so lazy that it keeps parting them, leading to repeated contrivances to somehow reshackle them together. Two seconds into the end credits an obnoxious outtake gag reel plays, showing just how much fun all the actors had making the movie (and revealing director Anne Fletcher didn't just use the first take of each scene, despite the film's lack of polish suggesting otherwise). After flubbing one of her lines, Witherspoon remarks "I was going for the performance of a lifetime", only to immediately laugh at the ridiculousness of the concept. Well, at least everyone knows what they're making is utter sh*te. Have you seen Hot Pursuit? What did you think? Share your anger down in the comments.