Review: Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Did You Hear About the Morgans? Do you really want to hear about the Morgans, because you've heard and seen it all before, several times, and it's a formula that needs to be put to rest.

On the run from organized crime, an estranged New York couple (Sarah Jessica Morgan, Hugh Grant) are forced into witness protection. They balk, but they, to the middle of nowhere, where they have to deal with their issues.

Bad bagel jokes and shopping jokes and culture shocks abound, and logic is clear out the window, because heavens forbid that there might be another way to move the story along besides having these vital witness left alone to their own devices when there's a hit man after them. There isn't an original character in the story, right down to the grumpy local who doesn't cotton to strangers, to a ditzy blond, to bad bumpkin cliches.

The refreshing moments are few and far between, as if Marc Lawrence couldn't decide if he was writing a relationship drama or a slapstick comedy. In fact, it feels so much like a sit-com, one wonders if Lawrence was revisiting his Family Ties roots.  Or his script for The Out-of-Towners. Just to give you an idea of how tepid the script is, jokes include such gems as "breast cancer.... I'm against it."

The actors have as much energy as you'd expect at a Sunday morning run through with everyone hung-over. Elizabeth Moss' predictably sniping assistant character is the only one with bite in the entire film, and it's about as entertaining as a yapping dog. Did You Hear About the Morgans? will make you wonder if Hugh Grant ever could act, and just how much botox was used on set. The few refreshing moments usually have Mary Steenburgen as a rustic deputy marshall married to Sam Elliot. Steenburgen seems at home in her survivalist-chic, but even she can't overcome the script.

Logistically, there are holes in the plot bigger than the state of Wyoming.  Apparently Lawrence thinks so little of the US Marshals and the witness protection service that in his reality, witnesses are left unprotected for hours at a time.  Nor does he understand the internet and how easy it is to look up the location of a phone number.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? has one thing going for it; it's less than two hours.