DROWNING MONA
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****):  * 1/2

Phil Dearly (William Fichtner) and Rona, The Waitress (Jamie Lee Curtis) are having an affair. At their usual hourly motel for the week's assignation, they quickly start to strip for a hot game of Wheel of Fortune. Enjoy the moment for this is about as funny as Nick Gomez's DROWNING MONA ever gets.

Peter Steinfeld's script calls for a cast of thousands -- all suspects in the murder of Phil's wife, Mona (Bette Midler). Meant to be an Agatha Christie style mystery, the movie is constructed as a series of loosely-connected vignettes, frequently told in flashback and without much narrative drive or momentum. Sometimes cute, the film has trouble ever working up to funny.

Set in the fictional town of Verplanck, New York, where the first Yugos were tested, the movie's on-going joke is that almost all of the cars are old Yugos. In the first scene of the picture, Mona dies in a car accident in her son's Yugo, and foul play is suspected.

Mona, the queen of her white trash family, is the town's most hated resident. When her family is told of her death, her son, Jeff (Marcus Thomas), has only one concern -- why she was driving his car. Jeff claims that his mom suffered from a "personality disorder" -- not exactly an original line. Like most of the local citizenry, Jeff has an IQ firmly in the double digits. The running sight gag with him, not that it's funny, is his stump in place of a hand.

At the center of the circle of suspects is boyishly blonde Bobby Calzone (Casey Affleck), Jeff's business partner. Bobby is planning to marry Ellen Rash (Neve Campbell), whose father is Wyatt (Danny DeVito), the local Chief of Police.

Although Wyatt seems rather lackadaisically to be trying to solve the crime, others show no interest whatsoever. As Wyatt's deputy (Peter Dobson) succinctly puts it, "Ding, dong the witch is dead -- end of story."

Like a firecracker that's packed with powerful ingredients but ends up just fizzling, the movie spurts along until the killer is rather arbitrarily chosen -- something that could be said of Neve Campbell's last picture (SCREAM 3).

Have you ever wished that movies featuring a large cast would have everyone wear name tags so that you could remember the names? Well, DROWNING MONA has a solution. Most of the characters have their names on the vanity plates on their Yugos. Cute, huh?

DROWNING MONA runs 1:30. It is rated PG-13 for some thematic elements, language and brief sexuality and would be acceptable for kids around 11 and up.

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