Review: ‘New In Town’

Ram Man:

‘New In Town” the new romantic comedy from Danish director Jonas Elmer. If this film was a recipe and Jonas was creating a great meal… he just gave everyone food poisoning by including Renee Zellwegger in the dish. Renee still doesn’t realize she isn’t funny and in ‘New In Town’ she has slimmed down so much she resembles a human bobble-head. I guess the next fateful “ingredient”   would be Harry Connick Jr. That is the team to get me out to the theater… NOT!

Zellwegger plays Lucy Hill a Miami beach resident and executive for Food manufacturing company that sends her (kicking and screaming) to frigid Minnesota to restructure a processing plant to manufacture energy bars. The locals meet Lucy with an equally frigid welcome and began to wager on how long she will actually last in the great white north.   Lucy fist hurdle with the plant is winning over the Union rep (and love interest in the film) Ted Mitchell (Connick, Jr).

‘New InTown’ features all the usual fish-out-of-water humor you might imagine dropping someone from Florida in Minnesota in November. Lucy even gets her car stuck in a snow drift and is forced to raise her red nightie as a distress flag. Thankfully we never see her in it or the crowd would be distressed. Connick’s character of Ted Mitchell is the same guy he played in Hope Floats, backwards country guy going to tame the city-slicker. The bright spot of the film that makes it viewable is the townspeople. The people in Minnesota lead by the great character actor J.K. Simmons as the plant foreman, who constantly mess with Lucy until she ends up firing him. Talk about wrongful termination!

Ads are saying ‘New In Town’ is the first really good comedy of 2009…I guess those folks missed Paul Blart:Mall Cop. ‘New In Town’ has a few laughs and is a valid reason to make a trip to the video store. But the is nothing “new” about ‘New In Town’ to make you throw down $10+ to see it at the cinema.

[Overall: 1.75 stars out of 5]

Jeremy:

Renee Zellweger is not an actress who is easy to hate. Her cherub-like facial features give off a radiance that could melt even the most frigid, wintry locale. However, with ‘New in Town’, we are supposed to hate her. Okay, maybe “hate† is a strong word. We aren’t supposed to care much for her in the early parts of the film. It’s only late in the game, when the woman’s heart begins to turn from cold to luke-warm, that we are allowed to look upon her with any kind of acceptance. Unfortunately, by that point, we’re already so involved in not liking her that not even Ms. Zellweger’s squinty eyes dripping tears can win us back.

Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, a big-city consultant who is sent to a small town in Minnesota by her corporate bosses. She is sent to oversee the restructuring of a food-manufacturing plant, and, if necessary, trim the fat of the employee list. It’s a thankless job, and Lucy isn’t exactly welcomed with opened arms. The only one who seems to enjoy her presence in the town is Blanche Gunderson, played by Siobhan Fallon Hogan.

Among those who aren’t exactly thrilled to have Lucy in town are Stu Kopenhafer (J.K. Simmons), the plant supervisor, and Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.), the union rep. Ted, rustic and unshaven as he is, is the hottest guy in town, so, naturally, Lucy will eventually fall head-over-heels in love with the guy.

The film, directed by first-time feature director Jonas Elmer, doesn’t exactly have anything new to say. There’s a nice correlation between the literal thawing of the town as it goes from winter to spring and the thawing of Lucy’s emotions towards the town. Like any good city-slicker-in-a-small-town comedy, Lucy turns from a fish out of water to a local yokel in no time. However, without much substance behind her character or much of the town itself, any naturalistic sense of the story is completely squandered. Eastwood’s character transformation in ‘Gran Torino’ was more believable than this, and that’s saying something.

There are a few moments of genuine comedy. Whether you like her character or not, there’s no denying Zellweger’s ability to perform physical comedy. In fact, she probably does so better than any other leading lady out there. One scene involving a hunting outfit and a broken zipper is quite hilarious.

However, the film takes so much time in presenting Lucy as an unlikable, corporate shill that, by the time she falls for Ted, we don’t care any more. We just want her to leave town, with or without the factory intact.

There are numerous things that could have made the story or the characters involved more interesting. This kind of paint-by-numbers storytelling isn’t even interesting enough to bash on any more. Once you realize how modular everything is going to play out, the film becomes dull almost to the point of mind-numbing. Lucy’s character becomes headache-inducing, and the filmmakers don’t even bother to remedy this. They just feel that if you throw a cute guy her way and film her falling in love, we’ll follow through right along with her. It doesn’t work that way.

Connick, Jr. and Simmons play their parts splendidly. Simmons has really come into his own these past few years, and it’s great to see his acceptance among the best character actors. However, it is Siobhan Fallon Hogan who gives, by far, the best performance in the film. She seems so sincere even if the direction involved seems to have been the director plopping her in front of a showing of ‘Fargo’ and saying, “Here. Imitate that.† At times, her character even lets us like Lucy’s character a little bit more. It’s a character as likable as Lucy is not, but Hogan still pulls off a masterful job at acting it out.

There is nothing new to be found in ‘New in Town’, a comedy that is, for the most part, completely void of veritable humor. It’s standard, romantic comedy filmmaking that, given the characters and the setting, could have been so much more. From concept to execution, it all comes off as flat and unflinchingly convention. Soap operas aren’t this formulaic.

[overall: 2.25 stars out of 5]