Jon Baker is a washed-up motorcycle cop trying to save his marriage, and Frank 'Ponch' Poncherello is an undercover FBI agent chasing a heist crew inside the California Highway Patrol. Dax Shepard writes, directs, and stars in this update of the old buddy-cop show, and he's fully aware he's making something crude and juvenile — the movie leans into raunch rather than nostalgia, for better and worse.
Michael Peña plays well off Shepard, and there's a scrappy, low-budget charm to how unashamed the whole thing is about its own dumbness — this isn't trying to be the smart, self-aware update of the property. Some of the jokes land, plenty don't, and the plot mechanics are barely there to justify the next stunt or gag. It's uneven by design, which is a mixed blessing.
CHiPs knows it's dumb and never once apologizes for the joke it's telling.
This was never going to be prestige comedy, and it doesn't pretend otherwise — it's a lower-stakes, dumber-on-purpose ride than the source material, and honestly a bit more fun for it. It won't convert anyone who dislikes the genre, and the hit rate on jokes is genuinely spotty, but there's enough goodwill in the central pairing to make it a fine way to kill an afternoon.
CHiPs began as a personal project for Dax Shepard, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film as a way of combining his enthusiasm for motorsports with an R-rated buddy-comedy sensibility, using the built-in recognition of the 1977-1983 TV series as, in his own words, a safety net for pitching the idea. Warner Bros. announced the project in 2014 and shooting began the following year. Unlike the original show, the production went ahead without cooperation from the real California Highway Patrol, meaning it couldn't use official CHP branding, and original series star Larry Wilcox publicly objected to the finished film on social media.
The film leaned into raunchy, R-rated comedy rather than the earnest, family-friendly tone of the original series, a tonal shift that alienated many fans of the source material and drew mostly negative reviews on release. It performed weakly at the box office relative to its budget. Even so, it retains a small audience among fans of Michael Peña and Dax Shepard's particular buddy-comedy chemistry, and it's best approached as an unrelated, adults-only riff on the CHiPs name rather than any kind of faithful adaptation of the show.
Shepard insisted on doing as much of the riding himself as possible, and the film leans hard on practical motorcycle stunts rather than CGI, including a sequence where he rides down a flight of stairs and plenty of wheelie work built into the action around him. That commitment to real stunt work is arguably the most polished thing about the movie; critics were far less kind to everything else, and CHiPs landed around 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Made for roughly $25 million, it grossed a similar amount worldwide, effectively breaking even at best once marketing is factored in — a quiet fade for a passion project that Shepard had hoped would do more for his directing career.
