With summer right around the corner and amazing movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron in the theatres, do not waste your time with a want to be “The Heat” with Reese Witherspoon pulling a Sandra Bullock. Witherspoon has plenty of talent and Sofia Vergara brings her usual assets to the table, but it is a waste of two actresses who are appealing individually and could have had amazing chemistry.
Rose Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) is a cop, with a bad southern drawl might I add, who is very uptight but is also very inexperienced and has yet to prove herself. We find out that she is the daughter of a late veteran cop and has been stuck in the evidence room ever since a taser incident, which is probably not the best time to be used as a joke with all the recent police brutality incidents.
She finally gets her big break to prove herself and shadow her captain (John Carroll Lynch) to escort the wife of a high-ranking drug cartel dealer to Dallas so she can enter a witness protection program.
The wife ends up being the one and only Sofia Vergara, aka Daniella Riva, a beautiful Colombian women who is constantly adored in tight-clothes and flashing mixed english. So she is basically playing herself.
Like every other cop comedy movie, nothing goes as planned. As they are getting ready to wrap it up and head out, the compound is attacked by assassins that lead into a massive shootout leaving Riva’s husband and Cooper’s partner dead in some awkward fashion of laughs.
The two women are now forced on the run, in a vintage convertible no less, with a reluctant Riva under Cooper’s protective custody. Along the way they run into more obstacles-an explosion of cocaine that leaves Cooper a little more chatty than usual after some car troubles, some awry hillbillies and some dirty Texas cops to match.
Too much of the movie feels forced to be a funny attempt at making the two actresses seem like real people. Riva makes fun of Cooper for being tiny and weird in two different languages which basically makes up the entire movie.
It is a frustrating movie and the end clips prove even more so after Witherspoon states shamefully sarcastic “This is going to be the performance of a lifetime.”
“Hot Pursuit” could have been super exciting as the two leads come to terms with each other and gain respect, but instead, the best part of the movie was Reese’s impersonation of Justin Bieber that looks like it did not need any editing whatsoever.
This movie gets a 2 out of 5 for me.