Two people, one car, and what do we get? Lots of trouble! I've examined the road trip comedy before as at least two or three of these movies are released every year. We get a lot of these road trip movies all the time because this is something we have all gone through; the long stretch that never seems to end, the music that eventually becomes monotonous and the fact your going to loathe the people your riding with. Our transportation technology may have changed but the concept of a car trip has and will never go out of style. This is why we end up finding so much material for comedic possibilities.
What makes thins kind of story work is what kind of pairing that is going to be tackled upon. With movies like Vacation and We're the Millers, we've had a typical family. With The Guilt Trip and Sideways, we have groups of friends. Even with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Smokey and the Bandit, we set with people that hate each other from the start. All of these movies were able to develop dialogue that made the situation funny. All of these would be better road trip movies to watch then the astonishingly bad Hot Pursuit.
Hot pursuit has a funny idea for a road trip movie but falls to the biggest problem of certain comedies; they're not funny. Many of the jokes that happen range from gross menstruation monologues to crude suggestions of Reese Witherspoon having a mustache. This is something that I expect from an Adam Sandler comedy and not something with Reese Witherspoon who I know to be much more sophisticated. Sophia Vergara is one of the funniest women on television, but comes off more like that annoying yapping Chihuahua that you want to put down before it barks one more time.
Midnight Run is the best example on how to pull off a road trip comedy involving a cop and his criminal. That movie knew hoe to play the strengths of their players and put them into situations that a lot of people have faced. Hot Pursuit does not even come close to it. It was stupid, immature, idiotic, and even demeaning for women. It's strange to say that I would recommend Mad Max Fury Road over Hot Pursuit for women, but the latter knows how to be a feminist story much better. If anything, Hot Pursuit has set back women another fifty years.
There are sequences in the film that feel like they've been directly plucked out of other films. One of the sequences in the third act feels like a total remake of an ending sequence from Sister Act involving multiple look alike extras that disrupt a chase scene. You could also make similar comparisons of 'Hot Pursuit' to other films such 'Tommy Boy', 'Thelma & Louise', 'The Heat','Identity Thief', 'The Road Trip' and 'We're the Millers'. Suffice to say, very little originality or anything novel is offered.
4.9/10·IMDb
8%·Rotten Tomatoes
31%·Metacritic
5/10- Verdict
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