Breaking News In Yuba County (2021) We can still remember, with a head-shaking smirk, the avalanche of 'Pulp Fiction' knock-offs that flooded theaters. film festivals and video stores after Quentin Tarantino's breakthrough film shook world cinema to its core.........
Featuring dozens of chatty semi-slimeballs jabbering away in fluent pop culture before shooting each other dead......
Since the Coen brothers similarly altered the film landscape with gems like"Raising Arizona", "Fargo" and "No Country For Old Men", yet another crop of would-be Coens every so often tries to duplicate their unique mixture of oddball characters, quirky plotlines and sudden, cartoon-like violence.
More often than not, as in this movie, the results are painful to behold.
Not that the gifted Allison Janney doesn't give it her best shot, deftly playing the much ignored, much put-upon small town doormat, Sue Buttons.
Early on, the film seems to encourage sympathy for Sue, afflicted with a cheating, criminally corrupt husband (Mathew Modine), an equally shady brother-in-law (Jimmi Simpson), a callous half-sister (Mila Kunis) looking to climb the fame ladder as a local TV reporter, and an entire town populated mostly with psychotic idiots, some of them well-armed.
We'll not bore you (or ourselves too), by re-hashing the ridiculous plot, which officially kicks off with Sue burying her husband, caught in mid-heart attack while shtupping another woman. Into the grave with him goes 3 million dollars he was supposed to launder for the town's crime Kingpin.....(who, in the film's only subtle joke, is a Kingpin who runs a bowling alley)
From that point on, it turns out Sue craves her 15 minutes of fame as much as everyone else in the film and knows the best way to get it........playing the distraught wife of a missing husband for the cameras of a nationally televised phony, simpering tabloid host (Juliet Lewis).
But a sharp, tough detective (Regina Hall) sees right through Sue's bullshit and the Kingpin sends out a murderous hit-team, one of whom is his own daughter (Awkwafina, already wearing out her annoying comedic shtick)
We're all encouraged, we suppose, to laugh and gasp as the cast commences to bloodily wipe each other out with the fervor of a.....well....a Tarantino-Coen Brothers movie......(or maybe Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus'....)
We neither laughed nor gasped.........and the film's significant pile-up of dead bodies isn't anywhere near as witty and sick as it thinks it is. Just dumb and further proof the film had nothing on its mind beyond copy-catting better movies than itself.
In years gone by, we might've given this movie at least one star for Alisson Janney's always fine work.......but life's short and we're fresh out of tolerance for worthless crap like this. So we say even if you're a Janney fan, avoid this like the Omicron variant.
Zero stars (0). The only thing 'Breaking News' gets from us -breaking wind......
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