At some point, Allison Janney is gonna lose you. It might be in the first screenshot; it might be after she buries her husband in a sandbox; it might not be until she keeps giving Regina Hall the runaround. But at some point, she is going to lose you. And when that happens, the Breaking News in Yuba County is that this film has no audience.
For a while, Sue Buttons (Janney) had both my sympathy and my attention. It’s her birthday, and her lyin’ cheatin’ thiefweasel of a husband (Matthew Modine) has not only forgotten it, he’s bought flowers for another woman … a woman he’s going to plow at nearby motel … ON HIS WIFE’S BIRTHDAY. Why, this is lower than your average country music lyric.
To compound matters, Sue is frighteningly insecure. She has a self-help mantra that she repeats every time anxiety happens … and there’s a lot of anxiety in this woman’s life. We feel sorry for her when we see the antics of Karl (Modine). We’re 100% with her when she follows him to the motel and confronts him riding the other woman. We’re still with her when he suffers a fatal heart attack on the spot and she barks at the woman to get dressed and leave.
And then she buries Karl beneath the motel swing set?! (This is where she started to lose me) And she seeks public attention for her “missing” husband?!?! Yeah, this is where loses me for sure. Oh,
but there’s much more film than just Sue. There’s her investigative sister (Mila Kunis), and Karl’s loser brother (Jimmi Simpson) and his insane co-worker (Wanda Sykes) and the two thugs (Awkwafina, Clifton Collins Jr) looking for the $3M that Karl stole and the detective assigned to the case (Hall) and the flaky talk show host (Juliette Lewis) … all doing Lord-know-what. Some of these people think they’re in a comedy; some think they’re in a drama.
As you can see from the last paragraph, Breaking News in Yuba County has a handful people we like seeing on screen. Here’s the thing; I don’t like seeing them die on screen. And for all Sue deserves our sympathy, her lies accounted for deaths. Many deaths. And by the sixth body, I was pretty done with this film. Whatever clever bit of fun might have been merited in the first 85 minutes of film went straight out the window with the least satisfying ending I can remember in many, many moons. For all I love Janney and Kunis and Awkwafina, I am really, really sorry I wasted time of this film. And there’s the most definitive Breaking News of all.
There once was a woman named Sue
Whose husband broke a rule or two
So she then watched him die
And repeated a lie
And out the window our sympathy flew
Rated R, 96 Minutes
Director: Tate Taylor
Writer: Amanda Idoko
Genre: How to waste talent
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Exactly how important is Allison Janney to you?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Fans of justice
