Some people liked The Heat, and some did not. But either way, the Melissa McCarthy/Sandra Bullock buddy-cop flick’s $229 million box-office draw proved beyond debate that there’s oceans of joke-oil roiling under the fertile ground of female-fronted action comedy. It’s not rocket science, either. Place one competent cop with a loose-cannon sidekick, and you’re halfway to a hefty payday and repeat plays in syndication on FX. Same formula, different gender. It’s almost as if women have the capacity to be every bit as funny as men. Go figure!
It’s hard to avoid comparisons between The Heat and the upcoming Sofia Vergara/Reese Witherspoon comedy Hot Pursuit (originally titled Don’t Mess With Texas), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like the earlier film, Hot Pursuit unites a type-A police officer (Reese Witherspoon) with a howling vortex of chaos (Sofia Vergara) and sets them on a course for life-threatening danger. This time, that takes the shape of south-of-the-border gangsters who want to snuff out Vergara before she can testify against her drug-kingpin husband. Witherspoon has been assigned to protect her, but it looks like some manner of game is afoot. Reese Witherspoon, who does not look like the sort of person who would shoot a gun, will shoot a gun. No need to hotly pursue the trailer! You can watch it below:
The trail of the tape
Title: Hot Pursuit
Director: Anne Fletcher
Screenwriter: David Feeney, John Quaintance
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, Jim Gaffigan, John Carroll Lynch
Release date: May 8, 2015
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “She’s having a problem with some lady business.”
The entire trailer in one screengrab:
At first glance, it looks like Hot Pursuit could go either way (and that was not intended as a pun on that shifty-looking setpiece where Vergara and Witherspoon fake a bisexual romance). The running joke of Witherspoon and Vergara’s characters getting progressively shorter and older with every new TV report is pretty dang funny, but some of this seems dreadful. Over the thousand-plus seasons of Modern Family aired so far, Vergara has proven herself a reliable comic actress. Her ear-splitting shrieks, however, are not what’s funny about her. Jokes about grandmotherly underwear and accidental penis sightings don’t inspire confidence, though there’s something subversively brilliant about using the quivery male fear of menstrual ickiness against us. For now, we’ll call this one a mixed bag and check back in when May rolls around.
Hot Pursuit was shot last year in and around New Orleans, where this writer was living at the time. While poking around the set, I was fortunate enough to get a quote from Ms. Witherspoon about the film and her involvement with it. When asked about the burgeoning movement of female-fronted comedies, Witherspoon said, “How did you get here? Are you on the crew? That guy with the red hair said I had another 10 minutes before I was requested on set. You need to go.”