HOT PURSUIT (Rated PG-13)

The notion of a female buddy comedy that pairs mismatched partners in a clash of personalities that would remind one of Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock in the wildly funny “The Heat” would seem like a successful formula for a really good comedy.

Maybe that’s what director Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal”) had in mind for “Hot Pursuit.” Or maybe she was thinking of a twist on “The Odd Couple,” with one person fussy and uptight and the other the complete opposite, but also hilarious in the same way that Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin were totally incompatible in “Midnight Run.”

“Hot Pursuit” is not that kind of movie. It’s not even close to being reasonably funny, which in itself is a great disappointment given that Reese Witherspoon and sexy bombshell Sofia Vergara offer, at least on paper, the perception of comedic polar opposites capable of delivering some laughs.

I believe that another critic referred to this film as a “hot mess,” and being stymied at the moment for a more original thought, I just have to say that there may not be a better description for what unfolds in this attempted comedy that misfires so badly.

Witherspoon’s Officer Cooper is an uptight and by-the-book cop, who after an unfortunate incident with the use of a Taser on a civilian, has been relegated to the evidence room.

No one even calls her by her first name or even seems to know what it is. Apparently, Cooper doesn’t fit in very well with the San Antonio Police Department.

Surprisingly, her superior, Captain Emmett (John Carroll Lynch), offers a field assignment that would seem more appropriate for a seasoned officer, namely escorting the wife of a mob boss to Dallas, where she and her husband will testify against a major drug lord.

Excited to get out of the property room, Cooper is an intensely enthusiastic policewoman who can cite every section of the Penal Code and does so, most annoyingly, with great frequency. She’s also very petite, even more so in comparison to Colombian beauty Sofia Vergara’s mob wife Daniella Riva.

There are few laughs (maybe just two or three, at most) in “Hot Pursuit,” but it is amusing when the stiff, tense policewoman introduces herself as “Officer Cooper” to Mrs. Riva, who in turn replies “Look at you, you’re teeny-tiny, you’re like a little dog that I can put in my purse.”

What starts off as a supposedly routine transport assignment, one that even the desk-bound officer could handle, turns into a danger-filled Texas road trip when Cooper and Daniella are forced to make a run after they become the targets of both the drug lord’s henchmen and a pair of corrupt cops.

Intent on obeying the rules and following protocol, Cooper rigidly tries to steer her charge, Mrs. Riva, on the road to Dallas, but Daniella is used to doing things her own way and in her own time. The bickering between the two women begins almost the moment they first meet.

Then things go wrong when Mr. Riva is killed in a shootout. The sassy, spoiled Daniella, who insists on carrying luggage filled with expensive, gaudy high-heeled shoes, has no choice but to make a getaway in her vintage bright red Cadillac convertible with Officer Cooper.

A series of bizarre events almost too coincidentally convenient to establishing the two women as fugitives from the law result in them being completely on their own.

It doesn’t help that Cooper and Daniella are completely at odds with one another, with Mrs. Riva ranting and raving like she just escaped from an insane asylum.

The film’s best running gag just happens to come from frequent television news reports seen in the background, which manage to keep decreasing the height description of the diminutive Cooper and increasing the age of the statuesque Daniella, much to the frustration of the latter.

While on the lam, Cooper and Daniella stumble upon a bewildered farmer (comedian Jim Gaffigan) they disarm by pretending to be lesbians who can’t keep their hands off of each other. Meanwhile, he shoots off his finger during the excitement. This is just of many lame efforts at humor.

A more pleasant encounter comes when the two desperate women commandeer a pickup truck, not knowing that its owner, the hunky Randy (Robert Kazinsky), is passed out in the back with a monitor attached to his ankle.

Being a felon himself, Randy is sympathetic and helpful, and oddly enough attracted to the pushy, forceful policewoman.

The misfiring gags run the gamut from Cooper in a disguise as a teenage boy sneaking into a drug lord’s birthday party to the two women taking over a bus full of senior citizens on a sightseeing trip in order to stage a highway demolition derby with pursuing bad guys.

As mentioned earlier, “Hot Pursuit” is a hot mess. The jokes are so redundant about everything from fashion faux pas to police procedures that the comedy is a complete miscarriage.

The collateral damage also taints the comedic talents of Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, but hopefully they’ll recover from this mess.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.