Did You Hear About the Morgans - movie review

It’s not a good sign when it takes you fifteen minutes to realise you’re watching a high concept movie.  Not that the high concept behind Did You Hear About the Morgans? isn’t painfully obvious: take ultra-urban actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant, dump them in the middle of middle America and watch the laughs flow.

But instead of spending the first fifteen minutes setting up just how urban they are, instead - after a couple of brief mentions of Parker running a real estate biz and Grant being some kind of lawyer – we get a whole lot of scenes explaining how they used to be married, now they’re separated, Grant wants her back, she doesn’t want to go back but clearly she still feels something for him, blah blah blah.

And then they witness a murder and get shipped off by witness protection to Ray, Wyoming, where people wear cowboy hats, love guns, and aren’t that worried about the bears that just wander up to their back doors. There’s the occasional half-hearted stab at playing up the fish-out-of-water angle (she won’t eat meat but turns out to be good at shooting; he’s scared of bears but can ride a horse), but the film’s heart’s not in it.

In fact, Grant’s fear of bears isn’t even mentioned until they reach Ray and then it’s just assumed as prior knowledge, so either a scene was cut or the film-makers couldn’t be bothered setting up the joke. Oddly, for a film that feels sloppy around the edges (count how many times a Grant line has clearly been dubbed in afterwards), for the most part the story works ok.

By keeping the focus on the relationship between the two leads – it’s no spoiler to let you know that they start to drift back together -  the film plays to its pretty much only strength: Parker and Grant. Neither actor is really known these days for churning out winners, but they are seasoned romantic comedy professionals and they manage to inject some wit and warmth into a film that really doesn’t deserve it.

Sure, at best this will leave you wishing desperately that the duo would get themselves into a film worthy of their talents (Grant especially: even here, where he’s clearly only operating at half strength, he’s way better than the material he’s given). But considering how limp everything else about this film happens to be - seriously, at one stage a bad guy is dispatched by a thrown horse-shoe - it could have ended up a whole lot worse.

Did You Hear About The Morgans opens in cinemas on Boxing Day.
You can view the Did You Hear About The Morgans movie trailer here on TheVine.