Officer Rose Cooper was pretty much a cop before she could even talk. From the time she was just a mere tyke tucked into a car seat, through pigtails and braces, right up ’til her first big date at prom, she spent a whole lotta time getting carted around in her dad’s squad car. She was proud of her father. And he was proud of her.
All grown up, she’s trying her hardest to be a straight-arrow San Antonio police officer, but she hasn’t quite managed to live up to her dad’s reputation. Let’s face it, it’s not so easy to throw your weight around when you’re a 5′ 1″ female who weighs in at maybe 99 lbs. And the one time she got a bit overzealous, well, it ended up in her accidentally Tasering and setting the mayor’s teenage son on fire.
Don’t ask. She doesn’t want to talk about it now that she’s stuck behind a desk in the evidence room.
But a shot at redemption comes in the form of a federal case requiring the help of a local female officer. One Felipe Riva—a mobster lieutenant for the infamous Vicente Cortez—is going to testify against his drug cartel boss. What Ms. Cooper needs to do is escort Riva’s wife, Daniella, to a safe house in Dallas before the trial.
She figures that should be easy enough.
But Rose hasn’t yet met Daniella, a glamour-obsessed type who prances around in sky-high heels and hyper-haute outfits. Just toting suitcases full of shoes to the car is going to be a Herculean task!
And then there are all the accessories … to murder. Yep, there are hit men on the loose. Riva and his detective escort are both brutally murdered in short order. So Daniella and her detective escort (read: Rose!) are surely in the crosshairs next. Before Daniella can properly scream “Ay Yai Yai!” the buttoned-down Cooper and her conspicuous Colombian charge are running for their lives.
Cocaine.
Crooked cops.
Cartel killers.
Carnal curves.
And comedy.
Call me crazy, but something tells me that’s going to create some content concerns.
Rose prides herself on being an upright cop and a good person, just like her dad. And through most of the film she lives up to that goal. Never minding her diminutive size, she readily steps up to fulfill her duty to protect and serve.
Daniella crosses herself and (comically) says a prayer for Cooper’s deceased dad. Rose meets a guy she found on Christian Mingle.
The film takes every opportunity to showcase (nay, ogle) Daniella’s physical form. Close-ups. Pans. Lingering looks. She wears tight, low-cut outfits, and once she slips off the top of her dress to show us her bra. (During the credits that dress-unzipping scene is played again, only this time she unzips all the way down to expose her bare backside.)
Rose sports some cleavage as well at one point. We see her bent over changing clothes, and the camera takes note of her white “granny” underwear. When she walks in on a man who’s naked, we see his torso and a bit of his backside. She and this guy, now wearing a towel, kiss.
A number of gags revolve around Cooper’s sex life, including a running joke about her being gay. She and Daniella pretend to be lesbians, kissing and fondling each other awkwardly.
Men are shot and killed in a gun battle. Daniella and Rose are wounded with bullets. Two people are set on fire when Taser zaps ignite spilled alcohol. Somebody’s thumped upside the head with a fire extinguisher. A guy accidentally shoots off the end of his finger. A man punches a cop in the face, and Cooper later gets the same treatment from Daniella—which knocks her out cold.
Motor vehicles—including a tour bus full of elderly passengers, a truck and several cars—slam and smash together. Gunmen shoot out a bus’s window, motivating the driver to leap out of the still-moving vehicle.
The straight-laced Cooper rarely says anything harsher than “dang it.” But the same cannot be said of her compatriots. From them we get a half dozen s-words and “mother-effing.” “D–n,” “a–,” “h—” and “b–ch” pop up a few times each. And there are six or eight misuses of God’s name (once with “d–n”).
People imbibe at a party and at a casino. Daniella grabs and drinks small bottles of booze from a hotel mini-fridge. Teens are shown walking across a park with alcohol in hand. Passed out, a drunken man wakes up in the back of his truck after it’s been stolen.
A car with 42 kilos of cocaine in the trunk is hit by a truck—the impact blowing the drug into the air, covering Cooper and Daniella with white powder. Cooper gets a bit frantic and crazed as she breaths the stuff in.
[Spoiler Warning] You might have noticed that earlier in this review I said that through most of the film, Rose tries to do the right thing. Unfortunately, in the end she compromises some of her integrity by illegally removing items from an evidence locker.
Also, some of this pic’s gags cross over into crude, including a lengthy discussion about menstrual cycles.
There’s no denying that this buddy-based road comedy hits the screen with some Mutt and Jeff-style, silly slapstick potential in its tank. Reese Witherspoon can easily pull off the cute and guileless straight man, er, straight girl role. And Sofía Vergara has honed her curvaceous va-va-voom-with-a-broken-English-caterwaul shtick to sitcom perfection.
But the engine starts sputtering almost right away. Everything’s far too goofy and foolish to be smart, and nothing’s nearly absurd enough to register as farce. Instead, the pic contents itself with weaving back and forth down the obstacle-laden median—hoping crude gags, tired put-downs, vapid sexual nonsense, lots of awkward pratfalls and quite a bit more than cursory looks at Vergara’s curves will keep audiences revved up.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
