Hot Pursuit (2015)

Hot Pursuit arrives as a study in how a film can be female-fronted without being anything else. Anne Fletcher directs, Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara share top billing, and the plot is a Texas road movie in which a rigid San Antonio cop escorts the Colombian widow of a cartel lieutenant toward a Dallas courthouse. The machinery is an odd-couple comedy, two mismatched women bickering across the desert, and the engine runs on Witherspoon's tight-lipped anxiety and Vergara's willingness to shriek. That is the whole transaction. One woman punches the other unconscious and the film treats it as a punchline, which tells you what kind of feminism is on offer here: the kind that consists of casting.

On the representation ledger, the picture scores modestly. Vergara's Daniella is Latina and central, the villains are a Mexican drug cartel, and nobody in the production felt moved to comment on any of it. Race functions as set dressing and accent work, never as subject matter. The diamonds sewn into a suitcase of shoes exist to explain money laundering and to give the third act a prop, not to indict late capitalism. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental conscience, no meditation on bodies or brains, no rewriting of history. The film has no sermon to deliver and no interest in delivering one. It wants to be a chase.

The result is a comedy that critics savaged, with an 8% approval rating, and audiences met with a shrug. It grossed $51 million against a $35 million budget and finished second in its opening weekend behind a superhero sequel. It is not a political document. It is barely a movie. A film with two women at the center and almost nothing else on its mind is a rare specimen, and this one repays classification with a clean, quiet negative.