In Hot Pursuit: Movie and Lunch Day

Before our monthly movie date, my club went to brunch at a place that was a favorite of my husband’s. I call it the Breakfast Only Café because, 1) they’re only open between 4 AM and 2 PM, and 2) they specialize in breakfast food with a few token items thrown in for those who don’t like eggs or gluten. The tables on one side of the place are crowded close together and striking up conversations with fellow customers is the norm rather than the exception. On the other side it’s like the old-school diners with its long counter and line of stools where you can sit and watch the ten waitresses and five cooks hustle. And I do mean hustle. I’ve never been there when they weren’t swamped with customers. If you don’t like waiting in line you don’t go there because getting seated usually takes a half hour or more. They have fantastic food, but it’s not a good place to go if you’re not going right home in warm weather because they serve twice as much food than any one person can eat. Knowing this, I came prepared with a cooler and ice packs in the car. No way was I going to pay a fortune for brunch and see so much food go to waste. And did I mention the bakery goods you have to walk by to pay your bill?

The cafe was a terrible place to bring a person in a wheelchair, though, because Don’s chair bottle-necked the place even more than it naturally gets. There are only three tables that a person in a wheelchair can even get to and use, so our wait was often longer than other people’s. But how do you say ‘no’ to a guy who lost so much of his life with the stroke? I rarely could. If he wanted to go to the Breakfast Only Café we went even though I felt guilty doing it. I must say, though, the waitresses and other customers never, ever once showed annoyance of him being there clogging up the place. He was treated like royalty by the owner/hostess who, no doubt, set the tone for the others. I can’t say that about every place we’d been to over the twelve years of me pushing a wheelchair. Some people treat the disabled like they hate being reminding that life is fragile. Movie day was only the second time since Don died that I’ve been back to the place. I swear a widow would have to move to another city if she needed to avoid all the memory triggers. 

The movie we saw was Hot Pursuit with Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara. IMDb sums up the plot like this: “An uptight and by-the-book cop tries to protect the outgoing widow of a drug boss as they race through Texas pursued by crooked cops and murderous gunmen.” Don’t you just love how some people can sum up an entire movie or book in one sentence like that? I could never do it. The reviewer at Rotten Tomatoes called the movie, “shrill and unfunny” and “bungles what should have been an easy opportunity to showcase Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara's likable odd-couple chemistry.” The New York Times review said, “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. Hot Pursuit is cautious and tentative in its pursuit of laughs, and almost entirely unsure of how to go about being funny.” 

Personally, I think both the reviews above were a little harsh and I suspect they were being pickier than they’d be with males in the leading roles. But I didn’t go into the movie expecting to see a classic in the making. It’s a genre film, after all---slap stickiest and silly and dependent on the kind of humor you’d see in a Paul Bart (Mall Cop) movie. If I wanted to see smart humor, I’d stay home and watch The Big Bang Theory on TV or reruns of Frasier and Barney Miller. I like both Reese and Sofia---what I know of their off camera lives---so I won’t bad-mouth their acting in anyway. The characters they played weren’t the type that gave them an opportunity to stretch their craft like Reese's character in Wild did. And who cares? They’re making a living doing what they love and how many of us can say that?

How did the other fourteen ladies in my group feel about Hot Pursuit? Pretty much the same as me. We agreed it was lighthearted and funny enough to give us a break from the type of movies we usually see and we all found things to make us laugh out loud. But at the same time it's a forgettable movie that I doubt any of us will be adding to our video libraries when it comes out on Blu-ray. ©
  
See the movie trailer here.