The Movie: Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Reel Thing Rating: 3 out of 5 reels.
Rate this couple’s Reel Thing potential! 0 Reels1 Reel2 Reels3 Reels4 Reels5 Reels (1 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)
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We think a better question would be “Do You Care About The Morgans.” It is hard to imagine a couple with less chemistry than Paul and Meryl Morgan. We’d almost find it more believable if Paul Morgan had married Divine Brown. Actually we’d find it more believable if Meryl Morgan had married Divine Brown. We simply can’t figure out what brought the two of them together. She claims that it was his sense of humor that made her fall for him, but as his jokes are pretty terrible, we’re left to wonder.

However..now that they are together, we guess we’ll just have to evaluate the situation as it currently stands.

Paul Morgan, a Manhattan lawyer, and his real-estate-broker wife Meryl teeter on the edge of divorce after Paul’s infidelity. Paul has been desperately trying to win Meryl back, and as (bad) luck would have it, the erstwhile couple witnesses a murder in the midst of one of his wooing attempts. The criminals are Seriously Bad Dudes, so the FBI has to whisk the Morgans out of town fast, before the Witness Protection bureaucracy can set up separate locations for them. Cue the forced togetherness! In Montana, no less!

We expected the story to follow a tried-but-true course: being pulled away from everything that’s familiar would give the couple a chance to reflect, discover new things about themselves and each other, redefine their relationship, grow as individuals, and end up better people. The Morgans never got that memo, apparently. Maybe it was sent out after they turned in their blackberries.

Oh, we do find out that Meryl also slept with someone else while the couple was separated. But where’s the a-ha moment there? That they’re both bad at being married?

The big finale takes place at the rodeo. Naturally. The Morgans have to work together to elude the Seriously Bad Dudes, and Paul puts himself on the line to protect Meryl, prompting one of the more gaggy “you love, you really love me” bits of dialogue in recent memory. Their lives and their relationship are saved!

(As an aside, we have to note that a pivotal moment in the final action sequence involves a horseshoe being hurled at a Seriously Bad Dude’s head and knocking him out. You think we’re making that up trying to be funny, but, sadly, no. It actually happened.)

The tricky part about our jobs here at The Reel Thing is that we’re reviewing the couple, not the movie. We’re not here to answer the question: should you spend $12.50 on this or not? (If you’ve seen the trailer, we figure you already know the answer to that.) Instead, we ponder: are these two crazy kids meant to be?

Believe it or not we actually think the Morgans are going to make it. They really do have a lot in common. They are both pretty inane, superficial people, both have slept with someone else while pretending outrage at the other’s infidelity. We could not find a single admirable or endearing quality in either of them; her membership in PETA does little to cancel out the fact that the only thing she really seems to care about are her wardrobe (which is clearly designer level and therefore presumably made up of a fair number of dead animals). Neither of them seems to have any real sense of fear or of the seriousness of the situation they are in, and neither seems to learn anything or experience any growth from the experience. They are both the stereotypical one-dimensional types that find themselves in a new environment and decide that everyone else has to adapt to what they want. So in the end we decided that maybe they’re perfect for each other. They’re both workaholics. Both like clothes. Both have about as much substance as a ball of lint. They both think Paul is funny. It’s a match made in folie-a-deux heaven!

We award the Morgans 3 out of 5 reels. (We were going to give them a 4 but we’re deducting 1 reel for the horseshoe thing, because, you know, it was a horseshoe.)

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