First Hit: Mediocre story, partially slapstick, occasionally good out-loud laughs, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.
The set-up is that Officer Connor (Reese Witherspoon) grew up admiring her police officer father. She always wanted to be a cop. But with an embarrassing incident early in her career, she finds herself down in the evidence room. She gets a call to assist moving a drug informer and his wife to Dallas to testify against the head of a drug cartel.
The wife Daniella Riva (Sofia Vergara), is an opposite type person from Conner, her protector. The rest of the film is about putting them in instances where their differences are expounded. From the type of underwear to how they talk, their body styles, height and age.
The quips by the news organizations about their age and height were funny as was some of the dialogue on the bus they found themselves riding. However, the same bus scene had a shooting sequence when they were driving the bus that I found awkward and poorly designed.
This was the way of the whole film, poorly crafted scenes mixed with funny scenes (like her Cooper changing clothes in the sporting goods store).
Witherspoon was, at times, amazingly engaged and funny, like her very fast talking after being covered by cocaine powder. At other times it didn’t work and the scripting and acting felt tried. Vergara was really funny when she was talking about her shoes and what she can and cannot do. But I also found her restricted by the storyline. David Feeney and John Quaintance wrote an uneven script, which the director Anne Fletcher failed to remedy.
Overall: Although amusing at times, the outtakes at the end showed how fun and funny this film could have been.