Once there a hundred reviews of a film, I usually don't add my own. But I'm surprised at how low a rating this film gets from so many viewers. I liked it, and I think it's a pretty average romantic comedy. That's not to say it's a perfect film, however.The one problem I had was that the female lead character as a business woman seems too different than the same character as a wife and lover. There does seem to be a mismatch there.Some say the film is predictable. Yes, it is. Of course, I find most films are fairly predictable. What I liked was the cast. I generally like Hugh Grant, and this film was perfect for his rather deadpan sense of humor. I'm not a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker, but I thought she was good here, and I felt that the split personality of her character was the fault of the screen writers. This was also a good role of Sam Elliott; over the years, he has grown on me. And Mary Steenburgen, as Elliott's wife is quite good, and I think she is an underrated actress. For a while I grew tired of Wilford Brimley, but lately I've enjoyed him more.I won't go over the plot here; you can look that up on Google. But while the general plot is rather predictable, the fun is in how the characters get from the beginning of the story to the ending. It held my attention fairly well.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009): Dir: Marc Lawrence / Cast: Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen, Michael Kelly: Did you hear about the Morgans? It's a lousy film at best. It is a formula driven comedy celebrating marriage. Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play a couple separated due to infidelity. After witnessing a murder they are put under the witness protection program and are flown from New York to Wyoming where culture is different. As predicted they patch things up and are stalked by the person they are hiding from. Directed by Marc Lawrence with great scenery. Lawrence has worked with Grant numerous times including in the amusing Music and Lyrics and the terrible Two Weeks Notice. Grant and Parker are reduced to props that spout out bitter lines and pointing fingers but it is the third act at the rodeo that is truly embarrassing. Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen play the couple assigned to protect them although the roles are flat. They will teach them the finer points of marriage but ultimately they should be teaching them how to apply their talent to decent films. Michael Kelly has the worst role, which is the villain out to end the lives of our married heroes. While marriage is celebrated it is still reduced to corny situations and predictable storytelling within a film no one needs to hear about. Score: 3 / 10

...if you didn't consider yourself lucky! In this film, Hugh Grant is paired with Sarah Jessica Parker in perhaps the worst pairing since Vanilla Ice and Naomi Campbell in Cool As Ice. They play a fashionably separated, New York City power couple, who are forced into witness protection after witnessing a murder. These two city folks are put in the care of an elderly U.S. Marshall and his wife, in the middle of nowhere Montana. Let the fun times begin! Didn't Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley do this a decade earlier in Amish country? At least For Richer or Poorer could get a few cheap laughs here and there, but not the Morgans. The Morgans have no chemistry what-so-ever and their film is painfully slow and predictable. Hugh Grant is usually funny, but in this film, every attempt at humor is snuffed out by Sarah Jessica Parker, who has no idea what she's doing. Parker is just one of these people who was lucky enough to find her perfect role and she was amazing in it, but everything I've seen her in since Sex & The City has been awful! Did You Hear About The Morgans has been done, more than once, and if you watch this movie and can't tell what's going to happen, twenty minutes a head of time, then you haven't seen too many movies. This has got to be one of the biggest waste of money in recent Hollywood history and if you decide to watch it, then you're dumber than the casting director who thought pairing Grant and Parker was a good idea.

"Did You Hear About the Morgans?" is a "comedy of remarriage", that sub-genre of the romantic comedy which deals with a divorced or estranged couple rediscovering their love for one another. The heyday of such films was in the thirties and forties- in 1940 alone Cary Grant made three films of this type, "My Favourite Wife", "His Girl Friday" and "The Philadelphia Story"- but they have never gone away, "Bird on a Wire" and "Sweet Home Alabama" being examples from recent decades. As will be seen, both of these films have something else in common with "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" The couple in question here are two successful, affluent New Yorkers, Paul Morgan, a lawyer, and his wife Meryl, a real estate broker. (A profession which always seems much more glamorous and prestigious in America than it does in Britain). The two have recently separated due to Paul's infidelity, but he still harbours hopes of a reconciliation, and persuades Meryl to have dinner with him one night. On the way home, however, they are witnesses to the murder of a gangland figure (who also happens to be one of Meryl's clients) and are forced to enter the Witness Protection Programme when they are targeted by a contract killer. ("Bird on a Wire" also dealt with the Witness Protection Programme).Paul and Meryl are given new identities, relocated to the (fictional) small town of Ray, Wyoming and placed temporarily under the protection of local sheriff Clay Wheeler and his deputy Emma, who also happens to be Clay's wife. Much of the humour in the film derives from the contrasts between life in the big city and life in a small Western town, as the Morgans have an encounter with a grizzly bear and try, without much success, to learn how to chop wood, fire a rifle and ride a horse.Like "Sweet Home Alabama", this film takes a romantic-comedy look at America's culture wars, and does so from a relatively conservative viewpoint, something of a rarity in predominantly liberal Hollywood. "Sweet Home Alabama" satirises big city liberalism in the person of a snobbish and hypocritical New York mayor who panders to, but secretly despises, the working-class voters who keep her in power. "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" is less concerned to satirise city ways than to paint a positive picture of small-town life, again something of a rarity in Hollywood, which frequently makes small-town America the butt of some mordant, and often unfair, satire.Paul is relatively laid-back about politics; indeed, like most characters played by Hugh Grant he is fairly laid-back about everything. Meryl, however, finds herself at odds with most of the local people. She is an agnostic, a vegetarian, a supporter of gun control and a Democrat. (Was she, I wonder, named after Meryl Streep, one of Hollywood's most noted liberals?) They, by contrast, are God-fearing, carnivorous, gun-owning, patriotic and overwhelmingly Republican. (We learn that there are only fourteen Democrats in the entire town- or rather thirteen, one having just died). Yet despite these seemingly fundamental differences in outlook, Paul and Meryl quickly become friends with her new neighbours- and at the end of the day it is those neighbours and their guns which save them when the assassin comes looking for them.This was the third film directed by Marc Lawrence; the other two were "Two Weeks Notice" and "Music and Lyrics", both of which were also romantic comedies starring Grant. It gathered some unenthusiastic reviews from the critics and seems to be unpopular on this site, where it current rating is only 4.5. In my view, however, it is reasonably enjoyable rom-com, far more so than "Two Weeks Notice", which I disliked. (I have never seen "Music and Lyrics").Sarah Jessica Parker has never been my favourite actress, possibly because I generally associate her with that tedious sitcom "Sex and the City", but at least she makes a more lively and interesting heroine than did the terminally dull Sandra Bullock in "Two Weeks Notice", and Grant seems to have recaptured his normal easygoing charm which had clearly deserted him in the earlier film. The best acting comes from Sam Elliot and Mary Steenburgen as Clay and Emma, the solid and decent small-town couple who show that they are far from being the slow-minded hayseeds which Paul and Meryl initially take them for. The film's political and social themes are not dealt with in any great depth, but they do help to make this film rather more interesting than a lot of recent rom-coms. 6/10