Did You Hear About the Morgans Review?

Posted on January 20, 2010 - 12:41am by michael So Hugh Grant is setting himself up to be parodied again. I’m not sure why he keeps playing exactly the same role over and over, but he sure makes it easy for people to make fun of him. I heard nothing but bad things about his latest feature length sitcom, Did You Hear About the Morgans, and since I only recently suffered through the intolerable Leap Year, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to another bad comedy. I have to say that the movie isn’t quite as bad as a lot of people are saying, but yeah, you’ve seen this a dozen times before, and you’ve seen it a lot better than this.

So Hugh Grant plays some guy named Paul in a role that re-creates with remarkable precision the exact character that he played in Notting Hill, an immeasurably better movie. Except this time, instead of trying to date a world famous American movie star, he’s trying to get his wife Meryl back (Sarah Jessica Parker, coincidentally a world famous American tv star), who left him for cheating on her. Meryl is a successful real estate agent, and one day while Paul is tagging along with her at work, hoping for some attention, they witness a murder and become prime witnesses in a huge investigation meant to bring down a major crime boss. All this is irrelevant, of course, it’s merely a catalyst to get the two of them put into a witness protection program, so that the movie can throw down a lot of cheap laughs about city folks suddenly living in Wyoming.

And therein lies the movie’s major weakness. I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all, it’s just that it gets the characters put into an unusual situation and then gives up on ever becoming anything more. Once they get to Wyoming, they meet Emma (Mary Steenburgen) and Clay (Sam Elliott), a charming local couple who are taking part in their protective custody. Both fit easily into their characters, and Mary even has some really good moments, but is unfortunately saddled with bonehead jokes like how she and her husband nearly divorced for good, until he won her heart back by giving her some cows. “I love cows!” she blurts. Screenwriter Marc Lawrence makes very sure that we don’t miss the little detail that these are country people.

If the movie had done something more with the crime element it could easily have been much, much better, but once Meryl and Paul get out to beautiful Ray, Wyoming, it’s just a series of jokes about how Paul can’t chop wood and Meryl doesn’t know how to light a stove and neither one knows how to shoot a gun but at least one of them has a little blind luck. You can probably guess which one. Actually, the scene where Clay takes them to do target practice with his rifle was my favorite. The movie offers no belly laughs, but there are a few chuckles, so at least there’s that. Oh, and soon Meryl is made to milk a cow, so you’re not exactly gonna leave the theater sore from laughing.

Similarly, while Meryl and Paul are both city folks who seem never to have set foot out of a major metropolitan area (and Meryl proudly knows nothing about the world outside of New York), I would be lying if I said there weren’t at least a couple of moderately touching romantic moments. There’s a scene where Paul is able to illustrate his feelings for Meryl that avoids being overly cheesy or forced. It almost seems like it belongs in a different movie. But unfortunately, both characters are equally intolerable and entirely incompatible. It was hard to think of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts hooking up, but luckily it happened in a hilarious movie, so I was willing to accept it. But Grant and Parker just strike me as oil and water, I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I don’t find Parker the tiniest bit attractive. She’s all angles to me, man.

So 2010 has been spotty so far. I thought Daybreakers and The Book of Eli were both pretty good, but the disasters are quickly outweighing the surprisingly enjoyable ones. At the moment, the Top 10 films at the box office are Avatar, Legion, The Book of Eli, The Tooth Fairy, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Extraordinary Measures, It’s Complicated, and The Spy Next Door, and the Tomatometer lists them all as rotten except Avatar and Sherlock Holmes. Let’s hope this turns around sometime soon!

The Bean Meter