Did You Hear About the Morgans?

I'm your Early Warning System.
I suffered this movie so you don't have to, so pay attention.Because H wanted to see it, and because I have yet seen a movie with Hugh Grant in it that I didn't like, I foolishly spent 103 mins sitting through one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Did You Hear About the Morgans? is truly bad. The premise sounded possible: A married couple on the outs (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) who, chased by a hit man, are relocated by the FBI to a Wyoming hamlet. There a parallel salt of the earth couple (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen) teach them life lessons. Along the way, romance and comedy unfolds.
Well, it didn't.
Writer-director, Marc Lawrence, displayed no gift for character or crisp dialogue; Everything trite and tasteless was trotted out tiresomely, recycling the formulaic fugitive-couple premise from other movies and the forcing of an uncomfortable intimacy on people who are opposites. Shouldn't he know better? He's only been plowing this fallow field for more than a decade: Forces of Nature, (Bullock and Grant) Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality (all superior movies).
It didn't help that Sarah Jessica Parker, horribly miscast, looked startlingly like an old man in a strawberry wig in this movie. Long-jawed, with Men's Health arms, she always looked as if she's just completed a spin session with Madonna. Her sinewy perkiness had zero chemistry with Grant's stammering charm. They are opposites who not only did not attract, they appeared to be in different movies.
Grant seems to think he's in a better movie, and in a few scenes makes the movie bearable: He's simply very funny, even granted the pathetic script. (Okay, he needs more hair and is looking a bit old). Even Grant can't do much with the rest of the cliched material.
Elliott and Steenburgen lend a human dimension to the roles of a small-town sheriff and his wife. The ease with which they inhabit these characters stole the show. At one point I actually wished the grizzly bear would maul Parker, and the killer would shoot her but no, and then one hour and half passed. I had to eat a waffle with two lumps of butter drenched with maple syrup to get over the movie. It was that bad.