Mooseport outstays its welcome

Welcome to Mooseport, Ray Romano and Gene Hackman's bland little ditty about plungers and politics, is as inconsequential as its titular town. A film about elections, it's own campaign slogan could be just one word: "Harmless." There's simply no distinguishing feature about it. The acting is relatively decent, the conflict generally mild, and the comedy almost offensively inoffensive.

Mooseport is really a movie of "eh" proportions. You won't come out of the theatre wiping tears of laughter from your eyes, but nor will you exit sobbing over the waste of two precious hours of your life. Where Mooseport finds its cinematic niche is in the little-explored genre of clean but adult-oriented humor.

Surprise: Welcome to Mooseport takes place in Mooseport, a small, fictional town in Maine that is thrown into mild uproar with the death of its longtime mayor. The town's appropriately, but not overly, eccentric locals, beg Monroe "Eagle" Cole (Hackman), former U.S. President and now full-time Mooseport resident, to ascend the revered position.

Cole is the type of guy who views life as a contest against people who don't even know they're competing. Finalizing a bitter divorce with Satan-incarnate (i.e. the former First Lady), his life's sustaining delight is that his memorial library will be 40,000 square feet—more importantly, that's 20,000 feet larger than Clinton's. So it comes as little surprise that Cole accepts the honor of mayor in what he sees as a brilliant public relations move, sure to up the sale of his memoirs by a million or two.

Romano, lovable star of the popular TV series Everybody Loves Raymond, makes his movie debut as Handy Harrison, the town's plumber and fix-it guy and Cole's only competition. But it's not just the mayorial post over which they battle; Harrison and Cole find themselves golfing for the same gal: Sally Manni (Maura Tierney), Harrison's fed-up girlfriend of six years who's tired of waiting for her timid beau to buy her a ring.

Like Handy, Mooseport is characterized by an unwillingness to take risks. In some ways this makes the film much better than its rating and release date indicate—we are spared the extravagant toilet humor that could so easily accompany Handy's chosen profession and often plagues young-adult comedies (especially those released mid-winter). The humor tends to be literal-minded, but amusing. At one point Cole declares, "Until donkeys fly, they'll be calling me Mr. President for the rest of my life," and indeed, in the next shot is a donkey being airlifted by a Red Cross helicopter. Mooseport's good-natured brand of funny and bumbling characters are often at least chuckle-worthy.

However, when the potential exists for belly-aching guffaws, chuckle-worthy doesn't always cut it. None of the characters act with any apparent motivation, something that might spoil the trademark caution of Tom Schulman's screenplay. (His 1989's Dead Poet's Society catered single-mindedly to the universal, uncontroversial love of freedom and creativity.) Though supposedly the "most popular President since Kennedy," Cole doesn't seem to have a campaign platform. We find out nothing about his political views nor Handy's, only that they support traffic safety.

Like it's characters, the comedic potential of Mooseport is under-developed. There are flashes of genius, such as when Cole's ex (Christine Baranski) arrives to direct Handy's campaign, but they are one-scene gags that fail to liven up the rest of the timid jokes. Romano's engaging manner and Hackman's excellent comedic timing and delivery keep Mooseport afloat, but they're too reigned in by their one-dimensional world to fully overcome their dialogue.

Schulman refuses even to chance an imperfect conclusion to Welcome to Mooseport's central conflicts. He makes the mistake of assuming that we care about his characters and completely abandons the funny for the preachy, giving everyone a happy resolution. But in a film where so little is at stake, in the end there's really only so much you can do.

Welcome to Mooseport is rated PG-13 for some brief sexual comments and nudity.