Maggie Moore(s) – One Murder Too Many, the review of the film with Jon Hamm and Tina Fey

Jay Moore, unlikely manager of a sandwich store in Buckland, is embroiled in shady deals, linked to the child pornography environment, and doesn’t know how to get out of it. The worst for him is yet to come and when his wife Maggie finds out and threatens to go to the police, Jay understands how only a radical solution can solve his problems: so he takes on a hitman to scare herbut the latter decides to kill her instead, then burning her body inside his car.

As we tell you in review by Maggie Moore(s) – One murder too manypolice chief Jordan Sanders naturally suspects him in the first instance for his wife’s murder, but initially the instigator’s alibi seems to hold up. To divert suspicion, Jay contacts the killer again to kill another woman with the same name as the victim, hoping that the police will think that his wife’s crime was due to a case of mistaken identity because of the homonymy. Needless to say, things will start to get out of hand as Sanders’ investigation tightens more and more around him.

Two-shot

The beginning with the girl on the run and the discovery of the body the following morning when, upon discovering the name of the poor unfortunate girl, the action moves back ten days to face a long flashback ready to explain what happened previously, that triggering event that characterizes the narrative heart of a black comedy with a noir edge, which partially looks at certain films by the Coen brothers with obviously very limited ambitions. Right from the title Maggie Moore(s) – One murder too manywith the reference already in the Anglo-Saxon tranche to the name shared by the two murdered women, the film intends to put its tragicomic imprintwhich not at home will characterize the entire hundred minutes of viewing, although not without darker and unexpectedly dramatic moments that peep out here and there in the unfolding of a sui generis story.

Without balance

The disparity in tones and atmospheres is exaggerated compared to expected, so much so that it risks creating a disconnect that is at times too clear, making an operation lose consistency which, when analyzed as a whole, turns out to be all things considered, far too thineither for deliberately caricatured characters, or for a management of the gags and existing relationships between them which is grafted onto evident forcing, seeking sudden twists or shortcuts before a partially intuitable epilogue. Where Maggie Moore(s) – One murder too many manages to entertain only thanks to the solid and heterogeneous cast led by Jon Hamm And Tina Fey: upright, but dazed, police chief, he and sentimental interest / beautiful to save her. Furthermore, Hamm now seems to have subscribed to this type of role, in which he exploits his own pleasant smile in light opticsas also in the slightly previous one Confess, Fletch (2022).

Bad men

On this occasion the protagonist is directed by an old acquaintance of histhat is John Slattery who had shared the set of the cult series with him Mad Men. This is not his first work behind the camera designed for the big screen, as a decade ago he had already signed another black comedy, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, namely God’s Pocket (2014), with John Turturro and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. A first work with which Maggie Moore(s) – One murder too many shares strengths and weaknesses, starting with an impersonal and impalpable style which kills the viewer’s potential curiosity in the bud. Everything is so tacked together, with the culprits already spelled out at the beginning as the very matrix of the assumption, which only awaits that partially conciliatory epilogue, but that black irony that should have reigned supreme throughout the story gradually fades away in a succession of gags and jokes that rarely hit the mark.