Jon Hamm finally found his leading-man groove with last year’s Confess, Fletch, a sharp and sly reboot in which he seamlessly slipped into the role of Gregory Mcdonald’s amateur sleuth. Hamm once again tries his hand at solving a baffling mystery in Maggie Moore(s), a kinda-inspired-by-real-events saga about murder, fraud and betrayal. Alas, his charm—and a reunion with his 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey—can’t salvage a middling caper that’s critically low on comedic or criminal verve. Premiering June 12 in the Spotlight Narrative section of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it’s a cinematic flatline.
Directed by Hamm’s Mad Men colleague John Slattery, Maggie Moore(s) boasts a Fargo-esque premise, if little of that masterpiece’s spirited idiosyncrasy. In an unnamed desert town that’s as generic as its inhabitants, Jay Moore (Micah Stock) keeps his low-rent sandwich shop afloat by procuring expired meats from convicted sex offender Tommy T (Derek Basco) in exchange for pedophilic pornography.
This is an obvious and risky violation of Jay’s franchise agreement. More pressing still, it’s an arrangement that doesn’t sit kindly with his spouse Maggie (Louisa Krause), who discovers her husband’s illicit material and promptly throws him out of the house and threatens to call the cops. With divorce (if not jail time) looming, Jay is in desperate straits. To sort out his situation, he opts to do the nastiest (and stupidest) thing imaginable: hire a hitman to kill his wife.
Tommy T connects Jay with Kosco (Happy Anderson), a burly, deaf assassin who accepts the job and then executes it without hesitation. Naturally, Jay becomes an immediate suspect in this crime. With the walls closing in on him, providence (of a sort) arrives when he visits his local pharmacy and hears from the cashier (Oona Roche)—via chitchat about his rewards program—that another Maggie Moore lives in the same neighborhood.
To throw the cops off his trail, Jay hires Kosco to also off this second Maggie (Mary Holland), believing that it will make it look like his wife had been killed by mistake. This too goes off without a hitch, and as the bodies continue to pile up, Jay comes to believe that he’s sown enough confusion to get away with murder.
The fly in Jay’s ointment is police chief Jordan Sanders (Hamm), a lonely widower who writes about his feelings in an adult-school night class and puts up with the insensitive jokiness of his partner deputy Reddy (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed)—although in a recurring instance of cognitive dissonance, Jordan puts down Reddy’s inappropriateness even though the cop’s mild comments are far from offensive. Worse, they’re not funny, but then, neither is anything else in Maggie Moore(s), whose story soon has Sanders strike up a relationship with Rita Grace (Fey).
The neighbor of Jay and Maggie, Rita heard the couple arguing about “filth” shortly before Maggie perished, and upon meeting Jordan, she immediately asks him in for dinner because, well, Paul Bernbaum’s script can’t come up with a more natural (or amusing) meet-cute for its stars.
Maggie Moore(s) tells us nothing else about Rita except that she’s divorced and has a habit of putting herself down, and even that self-deprecation resounds as false, given that Fey embodies the character as confident and outgoing. She shares almost no sparks with Hamm, in large part because the material affords them zero playful or witty opportunities; they’re both bland two-dimensional types navigating an outline of a story. Ambling along without urgency, zaniness or sharpness, its heart on its sleeve and its colorfulness muted, the film is formally proficient—insofar as its compositions are functional and its shots match—and fatally lethargic, refusing to energize a tale that’s practically begging for cartoonishness.
Maggie Moore(s) instead leans into earnestness from the get-go, with sad-sack Jordan begrudgingly going on a date with his classmate and then choosing not to wipe cake off the corner of her mouth (which proves he’s not interested), and later failing to commit to Rita because he’s still hung up on his deceased spouse.
Jordan and Rita have exes who loom large over their present circumstances but the film never makes them feel like anything other than rickety plot devices, probably because its protagonists themselves are just slim archetypes: the wounded-soul cop and the girl who teaches him how to find happiness (and who eventually serves as his de facto damsel in distress). Whether together or apart, Hamm and Fey look stranded in Slattery’s lifeless frame, and that situation only grows direr as they navigate a tangled narrative full of unbelievable (read: sloppy) coincidences and strokes of luck.
The film’s supporting players fare no better, be it Mohammed as a sidekick who’s not nearly as off-color as everyone thinks he is, Stock as a degenerate who’s more whiny than wacky, and Anderson as a lumbering brute straight out of central casting. Maggie Moore(s) coasts along at a tranquil pace that’s anathema to excitement, as is the fact that the film wastes time having Jordan and Reddy chase leads that are dramatically inert (since we know who’s responsible for the carnage) and marked by individuals—a bimbo bar waitress, an anti-Semitic creep—who are neither quirky nor scary. The vapidity is all-consuming, and not mitigated by trips to a strip club, screaming arguments between husbands and wives, or the climax’s pedestrian shootout and car chase.
Most puzzling of all, Maggie Moore(s) opts for sincerity at every turn and yet, in the end, barely wastes a breath mourning the tragic demise of one of its main characters. On the one hand, that oversight feels typical for a slack festival throwaway such as this. But it also indicates that, beneath its sensitive surface, Slattery’s sophomore directorial outing doesn’t care a lick about any of these people or their predicaments. Like its dark and offbeat action, its empathy is just a pose, designed to elicit a few “awwws” on the way to a feel-good wrap-up that keeps actual emotion at arm’s length. Maggie Moore(s) is indifferent to its every element and, as such, it earns only indifference in return.
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