What happens when you team up a former X-Games star with a busted-up body and a painkiller habit, and an over-sexed undercover Fed with too much confidence, give them each a badge and a bike and set them loose on the sun-baked highways of Southern California?
CHIP happens.
More to the point, if you’re writer/director Dax Shepard, you deliver a buddy cop comedy loaded with enough action, stunts and hard-R humor to push it to the legal limit.
Shepard also stars as Jon, opposite Michael Peña as his partner, Ponch. “This is about two very different guys with vastly different agendas and skill sets, who have to learn how to ride together, pick up the slack for each other and ultimately trust each other with their lives,” Shepard says. And if that sounds a little high-minded, “It also has nudity—though granted, mostly of me—and epic chases, destruction, and explosions. I don’t think we went more than three days on this movie without blowing something up. The action is real, the jumps are real and the fights are almost real.”
In other words, this ain’t your parents’ “CHIPS.”
Jon Baker is a newly minted officer of the California Highway Patrol, CHP for short. Jon’s a mess. But, fueled by optimism, prescription meds and a single-minded desire to make good and win back his ex-wife, he’s ready to face any challenge or humiliation with everything he’s got. For now, that means playing it by the book, keeping his nose clean and writing lots of tickets. Just one problem: he’s stuck on day one with a take-charge partner who doesn’t give a damn about any of that.
Francis Llewellyn Poncherello, aka Ponch, is actually Miami FBI agent Castillo, a guy with a big success rate and the swagger to match. He also has a pathological weakness for women, especially women in yoga pants, which is a much bigger problem now that has to straddle a bike every day. Perpetually cocked and locked, he’s in L.A. undercover to smoke out a dirty-cop robbery ring inside the CHP.
Of course Jon doesn’t know this up front, including the fact that he was picked as Ponch’s partner only because they figured he was too green to ask questions. Or get in the way.
But when things get real out there, these two newest members of the force have to find a way to get past each other’s bulls**t and get on with it, because they have only each other to rely on.
Producer Andrew Panay, who collaborated with Shepard on the 2012 romantic action comedy “Hit & Run,” signed up for the ride as soon as he read the script. “It’s incredibly funny, and wall-to-wall action,” he says. “The comedy is edgy and the action is a little throwback because it’s not a lot of visual effects. We did most of the stunts in-camera, and Dax does a lot of his own stunts, so it feels authentic.”
“I can think of a lot of movies that are funny but I don’t remember the action, or it was just background,” says Peña. “This is obviously a comedy, but Dax wanted the jokes and the stunts to work together so when we transition into the action sequences there’s validity to it. He really gets the setups and the payoffs and how to break down the characters so people can relate.”
But in case there’s any doubt about what audiences are in for, “CHIPS” opens with this friendly disclaimer: This film is not endorsed by the California Highway Patrol. At all.
Photos courtesy of Warner Brothers
