Unfunny New in Town Instantly Forgettable
Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger) is a Florida executive with designs on becoming a Vice President for her food conglomerate employer. That being the case, she happily takes the job of heading to a small town in Minnesota to modernize one of the company’s new plants, potentially laying off half of the work force in the process.
Renée Zellweger looks clueless in Lionsgate Films' New in Town
Once there she encounters plenty of obstacles, not the least of which is the almost unceasingly friendly dispositions of her new employees including her ebullient executive assistant Blanche Gunderson (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). But worst of all is her growing attraction to the region’s Union representative, single father and fireman Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick, Jr.) a small town hottie even if his some of ideas don’t quite mesh with Lucy’s big city attitude.
I did not like New in Town. It bored me. Terribly. To the point I wanted to curl up in my theater seat and take a nap. Nothing happens that’s not telegraphed at least five or six scenes beforehand, while the scenario itself is so oddly banal and trite if it weren’t so flat-out lame it might actually be impressive. This is a movie that feels like a clock radio with a stuck snooze button, the clichés as ripe and as annoying as that never-ending buzzer trying to wake a person up first thing in the morning.
Kenneth Rance and C. Jay Cox’s (Sweet Home Alabama) screenplay goes through all the motions and assumes that a girly-girl Floridian would fall on her face repeatedly in the big, bad wintry wilds of the upper Midwest. It believes that small town people are inherently unconventional and funny, and that anyone with even half a brain is going to just look at their odd hats or listen to their silly accents and break out in streams of loudly obnoxious laughter.
The problem is none of that is true. Films like Groundhog Day work because the people become more than the sum of these stereotypes revealing personas that are as complicated, unique and well-rounded as anyone else's. Movies like Fargo work because they don’t make fun of their character’s eccentricities but instead embraces them, their more peculiar qualities just another facet to their natures making them even more genuine and real.
This movie doesn’t understand any of that, choosing instead to point a finger at its cinematic populace and madly scream, “Ha-ha!” It treats them, not just like morons, but as fodder for every bad joke and inane idea probably ever imagined, and once I realized this was all there was and that Rance and Cox had nothing else of interest to say I pretty much said the heck with it and attempted to tune the final few acts of it out.
Admittedly, Zellweger admirably throws herself into the picture as if it were of high enough pedigree it might win her a second Academy Award. Even better, she has solid chemistry with Connick, Jr., the two of them having a couple of sweetly intoxicating moments of endearing intimacy that totally made me smile. Also, as annoying as the film’s focus on its peripheral characters is (wasting veteran character actors likeFrances Conroy and J.K. Simmons in the process), I did sort of fall in love with Hogan, the actress having a sweet, sing-song demeanor impossible to resist.
All of which makes me think that if the movie had gone through another rewrite and if Danish director Jonas Elmer had paid a bit more attention to detail than maybe this might have been a cutely endearing rom-com winner. Instead New in Town is really nothing more than an instantly forgettable waste of time, and when 2009 comes to a close I doubt I’ll remember that I didn’t even slightly enjoy it.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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