The girl grows up to be Officer Cooper (Witherspoon), a dowdy, flat-chested, rule-quoting, evidence room flunky. On the beat, Cooper is best known for mistakenly setting an innocent man on fire with her Taser when she overhears him calling out "shotgun" as he and his friends head to their car. (Given last month's accidental killing by a reserve officer who mistook his gun for a Taser, this loses even the minimal humor the joke started with.) 

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 “Hot Pursuit” is an on-the-run buddy comedy starring Sofia Vergara as the wife of a criminal and Reese Witherspoon (also credited among the film’s producers) as a San Antonio police officer. Thrown together by improbable (though entirely conventional) circumstances, the two women head across Texas , mocking and humiliating each other on the way to mutual appreciation. 
 
 How you respond to the movie may depend on whether that description raises or lowers your expectations. I’ll admit that mine were perhaps unreasonably high. Ms. Witherspoon, though she has been doing other things lately, has a long track record as a resourceful comic performer, going back at least to “Election” and the sometimes delightful “Legally Blonde” movies. Ms. Vergara has for a while seemed more than ready to leap beyond her narrow, frequently hilarious, occasionally offensive role on “Modern Family.” 
 
 But while “Hot Pursuit” makes much of the vocal, temperamental and physical contrasts between its stars — not since Frodo and Gandalf has a difference in height been so carefully emphasized on screen — it doesn’t give them anything especially fresh or interesting to do together. We are in the midst of a comedy boom, and within it an explosion of feminist and woman-driven humor, but the news has apparently not reached Warner Bros. headquarters. Directed by Anne Fletcher (“27 Dresses,” “The Proposal”) from a screenplay by David Feeney and John Quaintance, “Hot Pursuit” is cautious and tentative in its pursuit of laughs, and almost entirely unsure of how to go about being funny. 
 
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 Ms. Witherspoon plays Cooper, the daughter of a cop who is killed in the line of duty in an ill-judged opening sequence. Her dream of following in his footsteps has gotten her as far as the precinct evidence room, where she endures the condescension of hotshot detectives. A mishap with a Taser — less than hilarious in the context of certain recent episodes of police violence — has made Cooper’s name a punch line, and she’s desperate to redeem herself with some real police work. Sure enough, her captain (John Carroll Lynch) gives her the job of watching over Daniella Riva (Ms. Vergara), whose husband is preparing to testify against his narco-stereotype boss. 
 
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 Before long, Cooper and Mrs. Riva — last names suffice until the blossoming of their final-act friendship — are being chased by two sets of gunman and forced into various slapstick- and insult-generating situations. Ms. Vergara teeters on high heels, threatens to burst the seams of her dress and mangles common English idioms. Ms. Witherspoon rattles off sections of the penal code and figures out what’s really going on just in the nick of time. They climb out a bathroom window. They pretend to be lovers for the benefit of a suspicious homeowner played by Jim Gaffigan. Some people are shot and even killed, but only for laughs. 
 
 So maybe I expected too much. But while a movie that fails to catch fire is disappointing, there is something even more dispiriting about a movie that doesn’t even bother to try, that tosses its stars a soggy book of matches and expects them to generate a spark.
– Any shot Hot Pursuit had at becoming this summer's hottest comedy has flown out the window thanks to what can only be described as some of the worst reviews we've seen in a while. The flick starring Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara has managed just a 7% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes as of this posting. And so, let the bashing begin: Brad Wheeler immediately asks, "What was she thinking?" referring to Witherspoon's decision to play a "cornball and annoyingly adrenalized" cop after wowing critics in Wild. "A year ago she was back at the top of her game, and now she's headed south," he writes at the Globe and Mail. While "the wackiness isn't completely without charm," he says the flick is "a zany piece of comic landfill" filled with nonstop lesbian jokes. Simply put, Hot Pursuit is "ill-conceived, not funny, overbearing, and not in any way worth watching," writes Claudia Puig at USA Today. There's no chemistry between the movie's stars and no jokes to keep them occupied, she writes, putting most of the blame on screenwriters David Feeney and John Quaintance. Puig concludes the flick is "a stone-cold, super-lazy sitcom version" of 2013's The Heat. The film is "almost entirely unsure of how to go about being funny," writes AO Scott at the New York Times. "We are in the midst of a comedy boom, and within it an explosion of feminist and woman-driven humor, but the news has apparently not reached Warner Bros. headquarters." He says his high hopes for the flick were dashed. "But while a movie that fails to catch fire is disappointing, there is something even more dispiriting about a movie that doesn't even bother to try." Still feel like you might want to see for yourself? Betsy Sharkey hopes to talk you off that ledge. Hot Pursuit seems "destined to become a late-night punch line" and deals "one humiliation after another," she writes at the Los Angeles Times. "It's so bad it will go down as Academy Award-winning Witherspoon's worst movie, at least for the foreseeable future" and "will keep Modern Family star Vergara locked up tight in her sexy over-the-top Colombian comedian cliché box."