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CHASING PAPI

In Linda Mendoza’s Latin-spiced romp, three women from different backgrounds and geographic origins meet up at a bungalow in Los Angeles and discover that they have one thing in common: the same man. But instead of confronting the three-timer, they wind up in a beauty pageant and get caught between the FBI and a pair of bungling hoods. The object of their affection, Papi (a smooth, hunky Eduardo Verástegui), spends a good deal of the film unconscious and in the back seat of a pink convertible as the trio jet around the city. Initially, of course, brassy attorney Lorena (Roselyn Sanchez), waitress-with-dancer-aspirations CiCi (Sofía Vergara shaking her form à la Charo), and pampered New York socialite Patricia (Jaci Velasquez) detest one another, but this is a tale of female bonding, so each silly travail they undergo is a mechanism designed to endear oil to water. The film hangs on its ethnocentric roots and the sexual magnetism of its stars, though much of what could have been is watered down by political correctness and a PG rating. The three actresses are fiery enough, and director Mendoza gives the film, a brusque, frenetic edge, but in the end, it’s just a rumba with two left feet.

BY TOM MEEK

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