Drowning Mona

Drowning Mona

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DVD Reviews of Drowning Mona

DVD Review: Drown this movie!
Summary: 1 Stars

Everyone in this upstate New York town drives a Hugo because the place was picked as a test market back in 1974. Hugos are no longer manufactured and, apparently, in this town, neither are decent paying jobs, since everyone still drives these ratty little cars. Surely there was supposed to be a joke in this plot setup, but no one remembered to write the punch line.

As the movie opens, the town terror, Mona Dearly [Bette Midler], is preparing to go somewhere in her Hugo. She makes it as far as a guardrail and plunges into a local lake. It turns out that her brakes were tampered with, and Chief Nash [Danny DeVito] now has a homicide on his hands. It doesn't help the investigation that all 400 inhabitants of the town are delighted that Mona is gone. About 100 of these people had a motive for murder. Bobby and Ellen [Casey Affleck and Neve Campbell], a young couple in love, both have motives. To compound the problem, Ellen is Chief Nash's daughter. Perhaps it is waitress Rona [Jamie Lee Curtis] who is having affairs with Phil and Jeff Dearly [William Fitchner and Marcus Thomas, Mona's husband and son respectively. Neither Dad nor Phil is aware of the other's involvement with Rona. All three have a good motive. In the end, though, it is nearly the entire audience that has reason to want to kill this movie.

Since Bette Midler's character is killed in the movie's first 90 seconds, we see her only occasionally in flashbacks. This is a grave mistake because only when Midler in on screen does the movie start to light up. Danny DeVito can play it straight or play it funny. Here is plays it only straight, which is another mistake, for he is allowed to provide no comic relief. The director Nick Gomez is a distinguished TV director, whose credits include Homicide, as well as HBO's The Sopranos And Oz. Perhaps he does not work in the comedy genre, but it's more likely he was given little, if anything, to work with.

Much of the time I watch movies at home alone. In this case I watched Drowning Mona with two friends. It is hard to make me laugh, which does not mean I don't have a sense of humor. My friends love to laugh. They frequently fall over from it. While watching this thing, the only things I heard from them were a couple of moans, a titter and a yawn.

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