Marc Lawrence (“Music and Lyrics”) writes and directs an inert, vacuous comedy about a separated couple that suffers separation anxiety from New York City when the witness-protection program hides them from a hitman linked to an international arms dealer. Out in Ray, Wyoming, Meryl and Paul (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) ride horses, shoot tin cans, milk a cow, mace a bear, chop wood, look at stars in the night sky, and find bargains in a big outlet store. Hosting these stereotypical city types are Clay and Emma (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen), witness protectors who teach the twits from Manhattan a thing or two about making a marriage work. Meryl is a bagel-and-Bloomingdales caricature from a Woody Allen film who runs a boutique real estate company that made the cover of New York Magazine. Paul is a corporate lawyer pleading for her forgiveness for an affair he had. The childless power couple have young assistants who come straight off the occupational cliché shelf: Jackie (Elisabeth Moss) is a ballbuster and anxious Adam (Jesse Leiberman) has the busted balls. Working cute, they make a merger. Lawrence seals no deals for laughs with lines about vegetarian Democrat Meryl and Paul, sleepless in the rustic sirenless quiet since “I could hear my cells dividing.” The movie West is evoked with a sampling of Max Steiner’s score from “The Searchers,” but “Did You Hear About The Morgans?” only shows what a vast trackless expanse a movie screen can be when there is so little to fill it. With Michael Kelly, Wilford Brimley, David Call, Kim Shaw and Gracie Lawrence. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Sandra Bullock plays another hard-driven pro without a love life. Emotionally rough around the edges, she endears as Margaret Tate, a tough, feared Canadian editor at a New York City publishing company. To stop novelist Don DeLillo from jumping ship to rival Viking Press, she traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair, thereby violating her visa. To keep her job, she instructs her abused young assistant Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her if he wants to keep his. Read the rest of this entry »

The husband-and-wife team that brought us the father-and-son drama “Bottle Shock,” set in a California vineyard, release another story with father-and-son friction. This one is set in California groves of academe. Randall Miller, son of a New York scientist, directs a script he co-wrote with co-producer Jody Savin. Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is stymied on his anthropology dissertation on cannibalism when his dad Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman) wins the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The old man is a royal asshole. His wife Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) is a forensic psychiatrist who testified on Jeffrey Dahmer’s mental health. A couple of escaped mental patients with serious father issues kidnap Barkley, who morphs into a colluding kidnapee. Turns out his dad’s legacy was indeed seminal. Seems he stole a colleague’s research and inseminated his wife. “Nobel Son” is a nasty caper pocked with uninteresting malice. It’s insufficiently cynical to really make us squirm. Plot machinations are baroque and, in the end, boring. With Thaddeus James, Bill Pullman, Eliza Dushku, Danny DeVito and a single molecule spectroscopy advisor. 110m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

Seth Gordon’s woeful holiday riot, “Four Christmases,” pits Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as a longtime couple who reject traditional notions of marriage and family because of their own unbearable childhoods and relationships with their parents. After crafting grandiose lies to avoid visiting family on Christmas, the two are caught in the act and are forced—here it comes—to visit all four sets of disparate, dysfunctional parents in one day! Such a deliberate structure could work if the picture wasn’t so offensive. First up, Vaughn’s white-trash father and cage-fighting brothers, who physically attack him without provocation other than that he’s just a pompous asshole who deserves it. Witherspoon’s mother has a house “full of cougars” and grandma talks blowjobs. Mrs. Vaughn has taken up with her son’s (former) best friend and that hasn’t gone over too well. Enter inevitable fight scene between our protagonist lovers, the wise speech at the end by the remaining parent and the kissy-kiss make-up. To complete the formula, sprinkle in a few fat jokes, putting urine inside a child’s mouth and rampant, practically unbridled class-ism, which at one point includes the line “I don’t need you to do that because I actually make more money than you.” Reese Witherspoon shouldn’t be puked on; Vince Vaughn’s charming- abrasiveness shtick has run its course. With Academy Award winners Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek and Jon Voight. Oh, and Witherspoon. Gordon’s only other feature is the documentary about videogame competition obsessives, “King of Kong.” 82m. (Tom Lynch)

Lazy yuks about lazy schmucks. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly have crafted fine characters in a raft of past comedies, comic dramas and dramas, but here work rather little to play 39-year-old and 40-year-old boys who live at home, sleep in, watch TV, don’t work and do masturbate; Ferrell’s Brennan with his mother (Mary Steenburgen) and Reilly’s Dale with his dad (Richard Jenkins). When their respective parents wed and blend families under one roof, the step-bros spar, then bond while swordfighting with their piss streams in the toilet. It’s a replay of a tiresome SNL standby: semi-monstrously immature over-aged idiots (emphasis on “id”) who appeal to suburban males fixated on their everlasting not-so-inner adolescence. “It’s a galaxy of this sucks camel dicks,” blurts Ferrell at one point. He asks his therapist if being an adult means he ought to carry around his high-school diploma. Another comic device is adult-acting characters using “fuck” in their expressions of exasperated disbelief at the two boys. Director Adam McKay (“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”) co-wrote the screenplay with Ferrell, and both co-wrote the story with Reilly, who also wrote a song titled “Hairy Balls.” Producer Judd Apatow continues his bulk output. With Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn, Andrea Savage and Rob Riggle. 95m. (Bill Stamets)