A by-the-book cop, Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) and a drug boss widow, Daniella Riva (Sofia Vergara), try to evade crooked cops and vicious assassins as they go on the lam through Texas. The police officer sets off to protect the widow but ends up on the run herself when they realize they’ve both been set up. Their journey to clear their names takes them on quite an adventure as they scramble through the south.
Now take another one off my list. When you think of comedic actors, I don’t think the first two that come to mind are Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara (maybe Vergara would get consideration for her work on Modern Family but that’s more writing than performance). This pairing just seemed odd to me and it just never seemed to work for me. The story here involves a “by the book” cop named Cooper (Witherspoon) must protect the widow of a drug boss, Daniella Riva (Vergara), by escorting her to Dallas so she could testify against another drug boss Vicente Cortez (Joaquin Cosio). Things do not go as planned when they must escape crooked cops and murderous assassins as they must stampede through the heart of Texas. Some might get the impression from this that it is a film about female empowerment but this nowhere near the case. Don’t let the fact that it stars a pair of females fool you. The underlying story here isn’t very original and doesn’t bring much new to the table as there have been many films like this. It’s just another pair of polar opposites people coming together after they go through a series of ordeals together. Cooper, the uptight, follows-the-rules type is taught to come out of her shell by the adventurous, bombastic Riva. This film was banking on the relationship between those two characters but it just didn’t work for me as they had no chemistry. Witherspoon and Vergara, as well as the rest of the film is just not funny and really lazy and a little offensive. Just about everything of Witherspoon’s rule-following Cooper was bad. From her southern accent to her overacting while trying to reign in Vergara’s Riva, none of it worked. Vergara who was never easy to understand as an actress was even more so here, just making fun of Cooper for being naive and/or a boy/man while also being a rich woman stereotype. This film had the potential to be funny if it had better writing but it fell apart for me during the last third as the overall tone changed dramatically and it was just even worse. Witherspoon and Vergara are funny actresses but they were just not utilized properly here. This is not a very long film, clocking in at around 1:30, so even if you don’t like it, it’ll be over relatively quick. Overall, this is just a lazy, unfunny film probably banking on the star power of its leads but just wastes them.
Score: 4/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
