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Dumb gags are the highlights in 'Hot Pursuit'

"Hot Pursuit" is one of those action/buddy/road comedies so ineptly produced, poorly written, dismally photographed, sloppily edited and misdirected that the dumbest parts compel you to laugh just to support the cast's valiant attempts to make this dimwitted movie work.

The beginning looks promising enough. We glimpse a montage of shots showing a little girl as she grows up sitting in the back seat of her father's police car, witnessing a rogue's gallery of interesting characters, until she finally morphs into an adult cop named Cooper, played by producer Reese Witherspoon.

Years ago, Cooper would have been played by Texas actress Holly Hunter as a humor-challenged, rule-spouting, code-dependent, by-the-book police officer.

Here, Cooper comes off as a pale variation of Witherspoon's more comically uptight students from "Legally Blonde" and "Election."

Coop's San Antonio police supervisor (John Carroll Lynch) assigns her to escort a married couple out of their home into protective custody so they can testify in a trial against a ruthless drug lord.

She no sooner arrives on the scene than it becomes a bullet-riddled allusion to Tony Scott's "True Romance" - two rival sets of gunmen inexplicably show up and start blasting, killing Coop's DEA partner and the federal witness husband of the exotically Spanish-accented Daniella (Sofia Vergara).

She escapes with Coop, along with her stiletto heels, tight dress and cumbersome luggage apparently crammed with expensive shoes.

Not only must they dodge the two sets of assassins still chasing them, but also the cops, who suspect that Coop has gone rogue and taken Daniella hostage. Then, the women might even kill each other before reaching safety.

"We've got to keep a low profile!" Coop tells Daniella halfway through the movie. Wouldn't this be the sort of thing Coop should say at the very beginning? Of course.

The arrested screenplay, from TV script writers David Feeney and John Quaintance, likes to take running gags and run them to death. So, poor Coop becomes shorter with each news broadcast, and Daniella's age, much to her egocentric outrage, grows older with each news update.

Normally in cliche-crammed action road comedies like this, the two opposite protagonists eventually find common ground or at least an understanding.

Under the lackluster direction of Anne Fletcher (she gave us another road comedy titled "The Guilt Trip"), the two women do just that, but without any foundation or emotional transition. It just magically happens.

"Hot Pursuit" goes fracking for laughs with a few outrageous moments engineered to force humor to the surface. A farmer shoots his finger off while watching Daniella and Coop make out to convince him they're genuine lesbians. (Don't even ask.)

The women, trapped in a truck stop restroom as assassins close in, struggle to climb out of a high window in a clumsily edited, embarrassingly unfunny bit of slapstick.

At no point do we sense that Coop and Daniella are in any real danger. They merrily barrel through one scene after another as if they're stuck on a shopping spree with someone they don't really like.

It might have been funny, when the two women don a cheesy deer costume to bypass a police checkpoint (seriously, don't ask), if a hunter had tried to bag them.

Never happens.

"Hot Pursuit" ends with comical outtakes playing over the closing credits, which is always risky because they might turn out to be funnier than the movie itself.

Nope. Fletcher really did choose the best takes for her movie. Sadly, for the sake of the closing credits.

“Hot Pursuit”

★ ½

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, John Carroll Lynch

Directed by: Anne Fletcher

Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for drug material, language, sexual situations, violence. 87 minutes

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