TORONTO — The comedy Hot Pursuit, this week’s only new major release, hopes to find an audience that’s not interested in The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal, The Guilt Trip), it stars Reese Witherspoon as an uptight police officer assigned to transport a drug dealer’s widow (Sofia Vergara) from San Antonio to Dallas.
Does Hot Pursuit deserve to capture millions at the box office or will it fall flat? Here’s a look at some of the reviews.
“Hot Pursuit is so bad even a wild bunch of die-hard misogynists would be offended,” wrote Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s so bad it will go down as Academy Award-winning Witherspoon’s worst movie, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s so bad it will keep Modern Family star Vergara locked up tight in her sexy over-the-top Colombian comedian cliché box.”
Sharkey’s not done.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone seems to agree.
“Forget a critique — what this hot mess of a buddy comedy needs is an autopsy,” he wrote.
“A laugh could die of loneliness in this shrill, slapstick buddy farce.”
Calling the movie “stupefyingly unfunny,” Travers singled out the “desperately trite script” and concluded that “Hot Pursuit is one hot mess.”
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At Breitbart, John Nolte described Hot Pursuit as “horribly conceived and acted” and “lacking in buddy-comedy chemistry.”
He added: “Nothing works. Nothing. The situations are contrived and predictable. The relationships are contrived and predictable. The bickering is contrived and predictable … and loud … and shrill … and grating. The evolution of the friendship between the two leads is contrived and predictable. The plot twists are — you get it.”
Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly, who warned there is nothing original in Hot Pursuit, didn’t completely write-off the movie.
“Some bits are genuinely funny,” she admitted. “But most, painfully, are not.”
Greenblatt said the blooper reel during the end credits is the highlight of Hot Pursuit.
“That’s where we finally get to see two smart, engaging actresses with real chemistry do naturally what they’ve been straining so hard to do for the past 90 minutes: Make us laugh.”
In the New York Times, A.O. Scott also noted the lack of laughs.
“While a movie that fails to catch fire is disappointing, there is something even more dispiriting about a movie that doesn’t even bother to try, that tosses its stars a soggy book of matches and expects them to generate a spark,” Scott opined.
“While Hot Pursuit makes much of the vocal, temperamental and physical contrasts between its stars it doesn’t give them anything especially fresh or interesting to do together.”
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about other recent movies
Max Nicholson of IGN believed the lack of chemistry is “because they spend the entire movie bickering amongst themselves.”
He added it’s not all the fault of the script.
“The acting isn’t much better,” wrote Nicholson. “In parts, it seems like Witherspoon is really giving it her all — particularly during the action scenes — but most of the time she comes off as bored.”
He concluded that Hot Pursuit is “humourless, obvious and, at times, degrading” as well as “gratingly vapid and wholly unoriginal.”
QMI Agency reviewer Bruce Kirkland liked the “great chemistry” between Witherspoon and Vergara.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “they also have to strut their stuff while battling through a terrible screenplay with a hackneyed plot and dismal dialogue.”
Kirkland said Hot Pursuit is “surface noise and silliness” but has “several laugh-out-loud moments.”
Francisco Salazar of the Latin Post complained that Hot Pursuit treats women as nothing more than sexual objects for men’s pleasure.
“It is sad to see a female director get in on the act of propagating the male gaze in such an explicit manner,” wrote Salazar.
Calling it “banal,” he concluded Hot Pursuit is “watchable.”
Red Eye Chicago writer Matt Pais had a different take.
“Fletcher takes jokes that might have been kinda funny on paper and crushes them with a complete lack of comedic rhythm,” he wrote.
Describing it as “painfully formulaic” Pais added: “A good comedy makes you disappear into the laughter, not feel constantly reminded that this is a movie trying pathetically to elicit more than 1.3 chuckles.”
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