In theaters Friday, May 8
1.5 stars (out of 4 stars)
One actress is short. The other talks with a thick accent. There, now you know about 80 percent of the jokes in this brainless and lazy buddy pic. Freeze and slowly back away.
Wait, actually, come back so we can ruminate for a bit. No doubt Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara — two of the most in-demand comedians in Hollywood and co-producers on this project — had a stack of scripts at their disposal. It’s baffling as to why they would green-light one in which they both come off like babbling buffoons.
Witherspoon plays an uptight, type-A, ponytailed San Antonio cop. The daughter of a respected (and deceased) police officer, she longs to honor the family name. Alas, she did not inherit Pop’s brains: She recently tasered a dude after hearing him utter the word “shotgun,” unaware that he just wanted to sit in the front seat of his friend’s car. She seeks redemption after being asked to escort Vergara to Dallas. She’s the fiery wife of a Mexican drug cartel lieutenant and plans to testify against the kingpin in court.
In other words, Tracy Flick must babysit Gloria Pritchett.
Immediately they size each other up with disdainful stereotypes. Witherspoon thinks her charge is a vain, hot-tamale diva; Vergara dubs her escort “Officer Lesbian.” But after they get ambushed in a deadly shoot-out in the Mansion That Drugs Built, they make a mad dash and go on the run together. Dirty cops are on their tail, as are indistinguishable bad guys from the cartel. Though one phone call would clear things up in a jiff, Vergara lets an iPhone slip out of her hands in an open-top convertible.
First stop is a tacky clothing store where the ladies can change out of their outfits and go incognito. Call it a convenient excuse to see Witherspoon in white panties and Vergara in a lace bra. For the rest of the film, Vergara prances around in an orange T-shirt two sizes too small emblazoned with the phrase “Butter My Biscuits.”
Want to know how these two masterminds untangle themselves from the locked backseat of a criminal’s car? Witherspoon wails that Vergara is menstruating and needs a tampon pronto or there will be blood. Each time the two are caught off guard, they scream in a high-pitched decibel that would scare off dogs. They distract a dumb lug — apparently, all the men in Texas are dumb lugs — by making out and groping each other.
Two men wrote the script, FYI.
At no point throughout this 89-minute flick do the characters ever step out of the tiny cardboard boxes they’re written into. Witherspoon remains so slow on the draw that when Vergara asks for a sympathetic hug (wha?!), she doesn’t realize her gun is being confiscated. She also kisses the first and only guy in the film that doesn’t threaten her life. (Though he’s still an ex-con.) Vergara, meanwhile, selfishly whines, hurls insults in Spanish and insists on toting around a roller-board suitcase because it’s filled with jewel-encrusted high heels. Even as the actresses hiss at each other (cue the respective height and accent gags), it rings false. Of course they’ll end up BFFs.
This would be a bit more amusing in, say, 1982. In 2015 — during a summer when Anna Kendrick and Melissa McCarthy are headlining big-budget comedies and Amy Schumer wrote and stars in her own smart film — two ace actresses don’t have to degrade themselves like this. Such a disheartening sight. As in, it physically hurts the heart.
Perhaps Witherspoon and Vergara are shoulder shrugging over the crass material. Indeed, judging from their lively joint press appearances and the bloopers that run during the closing credits, these two had a total blast during filming. Good for them for becoming close friends and partners in crime. Really. But there’s no need for you to be handcuffed to this mess too.
