Movie review: More of Me (Lifetime)
11/16/07 01:58 PM
By ED BARK
Most of Saturday Night Live's star women have gone on to smaller and lesser things.
That lately includes one of the show's best and brightest, Molly Shannon. She'll be on-camera constantly, but not very winningly, in the new Lifetime movie More of Me (Saturday, Nov. 17th at 8 p.m. central).
Numerous SNL males have graduated to lucrative feature film careers. From the very start came Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Bill Murray. The list then goes on and on, including Eddie Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler and lately, Will Ferrell.
None of SNL's women can say as much, and most can say very little. The Cheri Oteris far outnumber the Jane Curtins, Tina Feys and Janeane Garofalos, none of whom has made any real impact on the big screen. The late Gilda Radner had a shot, but we'll never know.
Shannon, best known from her SNL tour as creepy Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, doesn't exactly get the role of a lifetime in More of Me. She's Alice McGrath, a do-it-all mother of six-year-old twins who's lately obsessed with saving an historic old tree in danger of being uprooted by a bridge.
Literally out on a limb, she has little time for herself, her city engineer husband (poor Steven Weber as Rex) and offspring Viv and Boone (Abigail Falle, Jake Beale). The son is trained to go "plop-plop," but not yet to wipe himself. Unfortunately, this apparently is viewed as riotous comedy by the film's producers.
Alice eventually magically morphs into three disparate versions of herself -- the environmental activist, the dutiful mommy and the sexpot wife. The latter guise is particularly painful. Meanwhile, the real Alice is rendered invisible to all but her three stand-ins.
More of Me never jells into much of anything other than an overlong trifle with lots and lots of Shannon. She deserves better, but Hollywood isn't particularly kind to aging, plain-faced actresses. Particularly those with SNL pedigrees.
Grade: C-minus