Islamabad OCTOBER 20 (Online): Maggie Moore(s) struggles to move past its incongruent tone to offer any new light into solving the case of two murder victims with the same name.
When even Tina Fey and Jon Hamm cannot conjure up any chemistry, you know there’s something truly off. “Some of this actually happened,” is the announcement that arrives shortly after that bland title. I was quietly reminded of American Hustle, which released a decade ago and has not aged well at all.
Maggie Moore(s) released on Lionsgate Play on October 20.
Here, director John Slattery is working with his Mad Men co-star Jon Hamm, who seems to struggle as the widowed police chief, Jordan Sanders. When we first meet him, he is looking at the body of a dead woman shot in the head. “My God,” he says. “That’s awful.” Soon, the crime investigation will lead to uneasy encounters with a divorced neighbour, and the case will jump from the tricky business of murder to offer rom-com vibes with Hamm and Fey for company. It all lands in a disappointing mess, with a blank stubbornness about it all.
Maggie Moore(s), which is written by Paul Bernbaum, is a classic scenario of getting the tone all wrong. It starts off with intrigue: Jay Moore (Micah Stock) is a good-for-nothing man-child whose wife finds out that he is definitely complicit in a case of child pornography. Poor lady is turned to ashes before she can cut ties with him forever. Here, Maggie’s divorced neighbour Rita (Tina Fey) sneaks in to help, which complicates things more. A second woman by the same name (Mary Holland) is murdered soon after. Instead of trying to decode the clues that might link to the two murders, our man finds some time to woo the divorced neighbour. As more secrets are revealed by the time Jordan actually finds time to work along with his fellow officer (Nick Mohammed of Ted Lasso), the audience has had enough to truly understand what else is left to say than nothing.
The incongruity in tone aside, what sticks out like a sour thumb in Maggie Moore(s) is how paper-thin the characters are- as if they can summarize within two sentences using two key adjectives. With material as aloof and weightless as this, the combined talents of Hamm and Fey are utterly wasted. Not much of the humour lands. The vulnerability of Hamm’s performance goes against the tone of the narrative, offering no new giddiness. Rather, it comes off as an unnecessary distraction that could have been best avoided. Tina Fey plays a formal version of herself, which might have been a delight in a lighter context, but definitely not here. Both of them have zero chemistry here, and their scenes offer little scope to redeem the damage that is already forced into the distracting story.
They deserved better.
The rest of the supporting characters in Maggie Moore(s) add little to the lack of nuance, and come off as caricatures. From the brute named Kosco (Happy Anderson), who is deaf and takes orders after simply asking in his notepad: ‘When?’ to the bumbling Bobbi Kitten with pink hair with little sense of what to say: these are characters underlined in broad clichés, never really allowing some amount of depth to uphold their scenes. By the time the multiple strands are pulled together to usher in the loose ends- which the audience has predicted an hour ago, one simply ceases to care.
Maggie Moore(s) doesn’t know what kind of a movie it wants to be- a sweet rom-com involving two washed out adults, or a gritty crime investigation that reveals more than it wishes to be. It ends up playing like a dimwitted Coen brothers-inspired crime comedy drama with little energy or direction.
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