Movie Review: New in Town
Gold Circle, LionsGate Film Stars Renée Zellweger, Harry Connick Jr.
Jan 30, 2009
January has long been considered a dump month for films, and you can add Gold Circle/Lions Gate's New in Town to that sad list. This film is a shameless, clichéd mess that is saccharine enough to put most viewers into a diabetic coma.
New in Town Stars Renée Zellweger, Harry Connick Jr.
Lucy Hill (Zellweger) is an uptight Miami executive who has to go to the Minnesota town of New Ulm to figure out how to make the manufacturing plant there more efficient. We know she's uptight because she wears white or ice blue business suits, high heels and always looks like she's bitten into a lemon.
Naturally, she's forced to go there in the middle of winter (cue jokes about her being unprepared for the bitter cold) and somehow deal with all sorts of "quirky" rural types, including the hunky union rep Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.).
Of course, the good folks of New Ulm don't take to this uptight stranger in her designer outfits and her high-heeled shoes, but soon they learn to get along and pull together like good honest Americans should.
Will this flick regurgitate every fish-out-of-water gag and pratfall available? Yes. Will Lucy learn to appreciate them rough-around-the-edges-but-good-hearted country folks? Uh-huh. Will she learn valuable life lessons while romancing Ted and find a way to save the manufacturing plant from the evil corporate downsizers? You need to ask?
New in Town: New Film, Old Gags
Think of every urbanite-stuck-in-the-sticks cliché or pratfall you can think of: it's in this flick. There's the obligatory cold nipples joke, the getting shot in the butt joke, the trying to pee in the forest joke, and lots of falling down in the snow. Audience members will have a red mark on their foreheads from slapping themselves due to the recycled gags and rancid dialogue.
Just how bad is it? Here's a sample: " I put whey in the tapioca pudding." "No way." Way!"
Zellweger deserves better than this crap and she knows it. The fact that she's willing to suffer through the humiliations the script and director Jonas Elmer heap upon her either demonstrates Zellweger's willingness to fulfill a contractual obligation, or points to masochistic tendencies. If appearing in this recycled tripe isn't a payoff for a better part down the road, then she needs to fire her agent, pronto.
Crooner Connick Jr. does the absolute minimum he can with the love-interest role, while still being professional, and his interactions with Zellweger have zero chemistry. The talented supporting cast – which includes Spider-man's J.K. Simmons playing the ornery-but-decent plant foreman – is wasted playing the kind of oddball rural types who only exist in a hack screenwriter's imagination.
Speaking of hack screenwriters, scripters Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox apparently decided not to populate this film with any minorities; it appears dem coloured folks got no place in the new all-pulling-together America. What year is this again?
The Final Analysis
New in Town is not Michael Jackson bad. It's not even "so bad it's good" in that Rocky Horror Picture Show sort of way. It's the kind of movie where a reviewer sits there, chanting, "This can't get any worse, this can't get any worse . . ." And then it gets worse.
This movie gets a 1/10.
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