2 minute read
MAGGIE MOORE(S)
A Coen Brothers flick starring Tina Fey and Jon Hamm is a “thriller without thrills.”
RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, 39 min
RATING: 2 stars
BY REX REED THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND
This is a lame and witless attempt to emulate the kind of rural crime drama made famous by the Coen Brothers. It fails completely.
Jon Hamm, still trying without much success to establish the same meaningful career on the big screen he enjoyed in the TV series Mad Men , plays a rumpled police chief in a small, nondescript, unidentified town investigating the murders of two women, both named Maggie Moore, and ends up having a romance with the major murder suspect in the case, played by Tina Fey.
Alas, thanks to the second-rate screenplay by Paul Bernbaum and the clumsy direction by John Slattery, what could basically have been a zany dark comedy-drama plummets to a mind-numbing blank page.
Hamm and Fey are both simultaneously charismatic and wasted. He looks great and she knocks herself out trying vainly to inject into the sour script a soupcon of the kind of skillful comedic style for which she’s best known.
Neither of them succeeds in being anything more than tonally uneven. Hamm tries to humanize his character by making him a lonely, brokenhearted loser desperate for affection, but there’s no logic in anything he does.
Why would a professional police chief, even in a backwoods bump in the road, flirt with a murder suspect, then accept a dinner invitation from his chief suspect, and go to her house and risk being murdered himself?
Worse still, he doesn’t have a clue what to ask, because the movie never allows us (or him) to know either of the two Maggie Moores before they die.
Despite director Slattery’s laudable career as an actor, he hardly knows where to aim the camera. Jokes fall like stones with a deadly thud.
The murder mystery gets duller as it unfolds, and there is no excitement or suspense anywhere. It’s a thriller without thrills, in a brief detour on its way to cable TV.
