This romantic comedy is so sweet and innocuous it’s like a live action Disney cartoon version of life – the kind where people fight and argue all the time but no one’s feelings stay hurt for long. If that sounds off-putting, that’s not the worst of it; this has got the personality of a 60’s drive-in throwaway programmer, where all the jokes, plot and characters seem like sad facsimiles of the good scenes from much better movies. Watching Did You Hear About the Morgans? is a strange, time-warp type experience.
Hugh Grant sadly is part of the films hand-me-down vibe. It’s not the newly minted wrinkles or the mutation of his once bright, fruity voice into something mechanical and lugubrious (think Prince Charles, and you’re getting it).
Playing a lawyer eager to restore his marriage to upwardly mobile real estate dealer Sarah Jessica Parker, Grant seems merely harassed, trapped in the kind of romantic lead role he helped re-invent.
The plot, not that it matters, has the warring and estranged couple witness a murder. To protect them from the bad guy, the Feds pack them off into a safe house in Wyoming (because Wyoming is funnier than say Nebraska?)
Anyway, Parker and Grant end up sharing the abode of local Sheriff Sam Elliott and is wife, Mary Steenburgen. Under the tutelage of these nice country folk, Grant and Parker learn all 'bout Good Old Boy and Girl Tradition"¦shootin’, ridin’, eatin’ big breakfasts. It also turns out that Elliott and Sternburgen are sort of marriage counsellors, as in, they’re happy to offer advice to the feudin’ couple, even when it isn’t asked for.
Writer-director Marc Lawrence designs scenes that seem meant for us to be transported back into his leads past lives"¦Parker gets to re-live the brand n shoppin’ gags from Sex in the City (on TV they were tart and cruel, here they’re gauche and tame). Grant does the awkward, quip a minute thing; trouble is the quips don’t ricochet with any wit or irony. The one-liners just seem to flop out of him. Even the edits seem to freeze the pace, leaving a space for the movie audience to laugh. Since just about every joke here is a dud, these moments are just embarrassing.
Much of the running time is absorbed in Grant and Parker hashing out their 'problems" – his infidelity/her disappointment; her desire for kids/his fear of responsibility. The psychology and human interest operate at about the same level as an Elvis movie, except it seems less sophisticated when the moral isn’t put to music.
Lawrence’s fish out of water plotting is actually a bit of a waste; it doesn’t really have much story juice and nor is Lawrence interested in satirising cultural and character clichés. It merely seems an excuse to dress Grant as a cowboy and put Parker in a pink cardie.
