Oxygen deprived

>> Drowning Mona is a lifeless comedy

by MATTHEW HAYS

Drowning Mona reeks of laziness. A gaggle of actors--all attempting to play zany, colourful characters, but looking more like they're taking a vacation--populate the kind of small town that only exists in second-rate comedies.

It's the kind of scenario a screenwriter in L.A. or New York thought might be kind of funny. Aren't small-town types cute? They're all so stupid and lack any kind of morals. The types who have affairs with multiple members of the same family at the same time. The kind of people who would even dismember someone for trying to lay a hand on their half-finished bottle of beer.

They're all pretty easy targets, this gang of stereotypes. And though Drowning Mona features a pretty stellar cast--including Bette Midler, Danny DeVito, Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell--they all appear to be sleepwalking through the film.

Midler plays Mona, the film's namesake. In the opening sequence, she drives over a cliff to a nasty, watery demise. The town sheriff (DeVito) finds that the brakes to her car were severed, ruling out suicide and deeming the case a murder investigation. Whodunit? Was it her unloving husband or son? Was it Casey Affleck, her son's boss and enemy of her family? Despite the endless possibilities--Midler plays up her bitch/hag attributes to the max, making her the least popular figure in town--we know too soon who's involved in her downfall.

Never have so many actors breathed so little life into so many worn types. Curtis plays a bed-hopping waitress at the local diner; DeVito plays the comic sheriff who's got a grimace for every silly character in town; Campbell plays DeVito's daughter, a ditz who's hell-bent on getting married to Affleck (sexy young Affleck, sporting a California-boy look, offers some of the film's only rewarding moments, when he does some heavy lifting for the camera). But worst of all is undoubtedly Midler, whose acting career, after the abysmal Isn't She Great, couldn't get much worse (but threatens to here). She's been reduced to a series of facial contortions and snarky remarks.

I hate small towns as much as the next cosmo snob, but even village idiots from the remotest outposts deserve better than this.

Drowning Mona opens Friday, March 3.