I think we have heard about the Morgans, many, many times before. Not necessarily the Morgans themselves, but couples stuck in other really bad romantic-comedies. Yet here we have Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a film that is predictable to the letter and is composed of endless clichés that keep the audience waiting until it's finally over.
Paul (Hugh Grant) and Meryl Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker) are a recently separated, yet still legally married, couple. He is a lawyer. She is a real-estate agent. Paul is trying his hardest to make their relationship work the way it once did....before he slept with another woman. While walking together one night, he gets very close and even gets Meryl to agree to dinner, but as she reaches her appointment, they witness a murder. They immediately flee the scene by jumping into a cab.
After an attempt on Meryl's life at her apartment, a group of U.S. marshals suggest that they go into the witness relocation program. This lands them in Ray, Wyoming, at the home of Clay (Sam Elliott) and Emma Wheeler (Mary Steenburgen). They have no access to the phone or internet because it would be too dangerous to contact anyone back home. Here, they must adapt to life in a small town until the person hunting them down has been caught.
What we end up getting with Morgans is a very generic romantic-comedy that fails on both fronts. Meryl and Paul, as played by Parker and Grant, become nothing but flat, lifeless, two-dimensional characters that we come to care nothing about. It didn't even really have to be these two actors. These roles could have been filled by anyone of any acting level because they are merely the stereotypical characters we've seen in other similar films.
There is no real chemistry between Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker which is why the romantic side of this film just doesn't work. When there's no chemistry there, the audience isn't going to believe that these two could actually be a couple. Instead, you'll realize throughout the entire film that you are merely watching these two actors make the best out of a bad situation.
When the romantic side doesn't work, you had better make sure the film's comedic side makes up for it, which in this case, it doesn't. The film attempts to make the audience laugh through a series of one-liners that continuously fall flat. The script from writer/director Marc Lawrence just doesn't know what to do with these two characters besides sticking them in an all-too-obvious formula with sad little attempts at generating laughs.
The plot follows the usual beats where the couple is apart then slowly gets back together again, then more trouble for the relationship occurs only for things to be resolved far too easily. There's a little side plot involving Paul's and Meryl's assistants that feels very forced into the film. Its only purpose is to allow the would-be killer to be able to find them, which obviously has to happen or there would be no plot development (not that there's much anyway), though Lawrence certainly could have thought of a smarter way for the killer to find out.
With the terrible dialogue given and the clichés piling up, the actors just have to sit back and phone in these performances. It's a shame too because Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen are wonderful actors and deserve better than to be in a forgettable film like this.
After this, perhaps Lawrence will learn that romantic-comedies need to have at least one of the two main ingredients for them to work in the least. You can't just take the standard formula and mix it with City Slickers and hope something good will come out of it, because the result is just a 90-minute predictable mess. So now, having heard about the Morgans, I wish I hadn't heard about them at all. 2/4 stars.
Now playing in theaters everywhere.
Also Now Playing: Avatar, Brothers, Armored, Invictus, The Blind Side, Bad Lieutenant, Everybody's Fine, Ninja Assassin, Precious, An Education, The Road, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Planet 51, A Christmas Carol, 2012
Comments