‘Maggie Moore(s)’ Tribeca Movie Review: A Whodunnit, Buddy Cop Murder Mystery That Goes Nowhere

On paper, the concept of Maggie Moore(s), which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is incredibly fascinating: a darkly comedic murder mystery about a bumbling police chief (Jon Hamm) and his wisecracking deputy (Nick Mohammed) trying to solve the mystery involving the deaths of two women who have the same name and were killed around the same time. Add in the fact that it is loosely based on a true story, and you have all the proper ingredients to make the next Coen Brothers masterpiece, and it seems like the film’s director, John Slattery, thought so as well as he takes the Coen Brothers influence and runs with it. I just wished that he ran in a different direction though because the end result is a tonally dissonant, poorly shot and overall underwhelming film.

It is very obvious that the film looked to Coen Brothers’ films like Fargo and Burn After Reading for inspiration, but Maggie Moore(s) fails to capture any single element that made each of those films great.

There is so much that Maggie Moore(s) lacks that it is almost impossible to decide what to focus on first. Perhaps I should start with how poor the film looks from how certain scenes are just so weirdly framed and shot to the lazy use of go-pro shots near the end of the film involving a car scene with Tina Fey.

Maybe I should begin with how the film is so tonally inconsistent that it is never clear if it is trying to be either a serious murder mystery drama, a buddy-cop film, or a rom-com. How about I focus on how all the attempts at humor just come off as awkward, which is especially frustrating considering how Fey is unable to play into her comedic strengths due to the type of character she plays?

Every single flaw I mentioned is worthy of its own paragraph, but I think my biggest frustration with this film is just how wasted and underwhelming both its story and characters are despite having such a fascinating premise. The pieces are there: a murder mystery involving a man named Jay Moore (Micah Stock) who hires a deaf tough guy (Happy Anderson) to scare her wife, Maggie, straight only for the deaf fixer to burn his wife alive, causing Jay to hire the same fixer to kill another woman named Maggie Moore (Mary Holland) to throw the cops off his tail. In concept, this would make a great story, and yet Slattery does nothing with this premise.

The film feels like it is speedrunning through its own story as the film goes through each plot point quickly before moving on to the next, so it never slows down to build out these scenes or make them compelling. The film gives me no reason as to why I should care about anything that is happening, so when the only thing that is interesting about the movie is its premise, then there is nothing with real substance that I can latch onto.

The characters themselves are also so poorly written and fleshed out, and so the end result is a bunch of characters that feel more like cliches or archetypes than actually realized people.

Hamm has proven to be both a strong dramatic and comedic actor, and while he does not necessarily give a bad performance, his character lacks any sort of depth or intrigue that it feels like I am just watching Hamm the actor and not the character he is playing.

Both Hamm and Fey both have great chemistry with each other, but the film does not take the time to flesh out their relationship or make it compelling. The relationship is so unimportant to the story that it could be removed from the movie and would barely change anything that happens.

This is a film that I so desperately want to like, and all the pieces to make a great movie are there. Yet in spite of that, somehow somewhere the end result is something that feels incredibly rushed, incompetent and disappointing. Perhaps in the hands of a different creative team, this might have gone somewhere, but as it is now, the only emotion I feel when I think about this movie is frustration.