103 minutes
In theaters December 18, 2009
Rating: PG-13, Comedy
Did you hear about Did You Hear About the Morgans? Well, if you heard it was entertaining, you heard wrong.
This one's almost painful to watch.
Did You Hear About the Morgans? is a wreck of a remarriage comedy, a pair-of-fish-out-of-water pseudo-romp about two sophisticated New Yorkers who find themselves in the middle of what seems like nowhere.
Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play the title couple, Paul and Meryl, estranged-but-still-married Manhattanites. He's a well-to-do attorney and a Brit, she's a real estate mover and shaker.
So they're a blue-state power couple: she's high maintenance, he's low reliability. They're currently separated because he cheated on her, but he's pushing for some kind of trial reconciliation. Which is precisely when they have the distinct misfortune of witnessing a murder and thus becoming the targets of a contract killer.
So, as part of the Witness Protection Program, they are whisked away and relocated to the microscopic town of Ray, Wyoming, where the pace of life is slow and a BlackBerry is still just a small dark fruit. Mary Steenburgen and Sam Elliott play Ray's sheriff and his wife, the protagonists' red-state hosts, who take them in and show them how the other half lives.
Can these city slickers adopt the ways of the country folk? Can these Bickersons learn to appreciate each other and get along? Can we laugh or leave soon?
Writer-director Marc Lawrence has now directed three films and each has starred Grant (the other two: Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics). This third subpar romcom doesn't change the quality of their overall collaboration, which is underachieving at best and revoke-their-license awful at worst.
Few comic actors can do with a line reading what Grant can usually do with his deadpan delivery and sharp timing. But here he's saddled with a severely underwritten role that's part of a shoddy script and a nonsensical narrative. Lawrence's screenplay reads like a first draft that begs for major rewrites to no avail, and his direction allows gaping dead spots that bring the film to a number of screeching halts.
Parker has a sincere and appealing persona, and a winning way with witty lines. But those are few and far between in this case, and she and Grant -- who co-starred in the fine drama, Extreme Measures, way back in 1996 -- exhibit no chemistry whatsovever. Nor does the usually comforting presence of old pros Elliott and Steenburgen do much to raise the film's game.
If laughter truly is, as a character says at one point, the best medicine, then pray you don't get sick during the film because it will be of little help in that regard. You'll notice the silent sound of non-laughter often, far too many times immediately following allegedly risible one-liners.
The rhythm is just off throughout the entirety of this misfire: everything is at least a beat too slow. And as if what has preceded it isn't bad enough, the climax reaches an off-the-charts level of pure scriptwriting ineptness.
A witness protection comedy, Did You Hear About the Morgans? is also a witless projection programmer that we witnesses wouldn't mind protection from.
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