BACK in the day, visiting the cinema typically went like this: All stand for the National Anthem (God save the monarch). Cartoon. At Saturday matinees, a 15-minute episode of a serial. Featurette (a Pete Smith doco or Fitzpatrick travelogue, perhaps also a short story). First film. Interval to patronise the lolly boy or the candy bar. Main feature. Go home.

Ah, thems was the days! I recount their structure to remind readers how it was before TV. Note that cryptic “first film”, in trade parlance the “B” movie. A shoestring budget. Often shot on the studio’s backlot with a two-dimensional screenplay performed by a never-quite-reached-the-top cast.

Anne Fletcher’s “Hot Pursuit” reincarnates the B-movie, modernised in production aspects but still unmistakably a B-movie.

Reese Witherspoon plays Cooper who, as a child, absorbed cop culture and procedures in the back seat of her father’s cop car. For three years now, she’s managed the evidence store in the basement of the San Antonio Police Headquarters.

An unexpected career change sees Cooper assigned to accompany a US Marshal to escort Filipe and Daniella Riva from witness protection to give evidence in tomorrow’s trial of drug lord Cortez. That’s when it hits the fan big-time, as Cooper and Daniella find themselves fleeing nasty guys with guns.

David Feeney’s screenplay delivers humour mixed with defects of continuity and perspective, but heck, this is a B-movie where such things don’t matter. The film gets its energy from the interaction between Cooper and Daniella (Sofia Vergara pulling out all the stops), a kind of “Thelma and Louise” reprise well-supplied with comic moments that pardon those defects.

At Dendy and Hoyts