FAME AND FORTUNE (BREAKING NEWS IN YUBA COUNTY)

Hollywood has always had a penchant for tales about small town suburbanites sucked into violent crime.

These films are often violent and tongue in cheek.

At their best, they use every cinematic trick in the book to depict the moral degradation of their anti-heroes who should be behaving like model citizens.

Some even manage to milk the blackest humour out of the most macabre of situations.

Get the mix wrong, however, and you end up with a movie that leaves one hell of a sour taste in your mouth.

Tate Taylor's 'Breaking News in Yuba County' has clear aspiraitions to be regardedamong the best of the genre.

At its heart is Allison Janney's Sue Buttons, a mild mannered Kentucky housewife who wanders around a supermarket at the start of the movie, repeating out loud a mantra from a self-help daily affirmation podcast designed to build her confidence.

She has come to collect her own birthday cake and notices the e in her Christian name looks more like c but then meekly accepts it when the shop assistant ignores her complaint.

Married to Matthew Modine's dodgy bank clerk Karl Buttons, she is oblivious to him cheating on her and laundering money for a criminal gang.

Karl has also forgotten her birthday and so has her half sister, Mila Kunis' extremely driven TV reporter Nancy.

Undeterred, she books dinner in a fancy restaurant and heads to Karl's place of work to confront him about forgetting her birthday and insist they go out that evening.

Karl's brother, Jimmi Simpson's Petey is an ex-con trying to go straight with a pregnant wife, Samira Wiley's Jonelle.

Petey has landed a job in a home furnishings store run by a lesbian couple, Wanda Sykes' Rita and Ellen Barkin's Debbie who is wary of him because of his criminal past.

Wrongfully accusing him of stealing their stock, Debbie is rebuked by Rita who is actually fascinated by his criminal background.

Rita even intimates when her lover is out of earshot that if Petey ever wants to resume his life of crime she would be a willing accomplice.

While Petey is eager to remain clean, his ambition to pursue a better life is complicated by a visit to the store by his former criminal associates, Awkwafina and Clifton Collins Jr's Mina and Ray who want him to reveal which bank branch Karl has moved to.

After extracting the information from a reluctant Petey, Mina and Ray turn up at Karl's branch and threaten him that he needs to launder $3 million within 24 hours for Mina's dad, Keong Sim's crime gang boss Mr Kim.

Insisting he wants out of laundering money for the gang, Karl accepts a holdall with the cash after he is punched in the face and loses a tooth.

After they leave, it emerges that he has other plans and sets off with the money for a motel rendezvous with his mistress, Bridget Everett's Leah Norton.

Clutching a bunch of flowers as he leaves, he is spotted by Sue in her car, who mistakenly assumes they are for her and follows him to the motel, only to realise he has a mistress.

After securing a key to the motel room, she walks in on Karl and Leah in flagrante and watches her husband suffer a fatal heart attack.

Telling a hysterical Leah to calm down, she asks her to leave and warns her if she says anything about what has happened, she will expose the affair.

Watching news coverage of a missing child fronted by Juliette Lewis' celebrity reporter Gloria Michaels, Sue decides to drag her husband's body to a nearby children's play park, bury him and report him missing to the police in the hope that his disappearance may attract the same kind of media attention.

However she is oblivious to the fact as she buries him that the holdall she has buried as well contains the crime gang's money.

When she turns up at the police station, Sue is largely ignored.

However when she arrives home, she flies into a rage after watching Gloria Michaels announcing she is going to dedicate all her time to the case of the missing child. 

When her half sister Nancy turns up unexpectedly at the house, she is shocked to see it has been smashed up.

Sue immediately tells her Karl has gone missing and concocts a lie that she woke up to discover the kitchen and living room had been turned upside down by intruders.

Appalled that the police have not treated Karl's disappearance seriously, Nancy gets a camera crew from the TV station she works for to the house and arranges for a live interview involving an apparently distraught Sue.

This results in Regina Hall's Detective Cam Harris suddenly taking an interest in Karl's disappearance.

However the publicity also sparks Mr Kim's desperation to track down Karl and the missing money.

Mina and Ray are dispatched by him to find out what happened, using whatever violent means are necessary.

Sue's tall tale becomes even more elaborate with her appearing on Gloria Michaels' show, alleging Karl may have had information about the missing child case that may have resulted in his abduction.

But with Leah also knocking about knowing how he really died and his plan to abscond with her and Mr Kim's money, how long can Sue keep up the pretence?

Can her story hold up under the cynical gaze of Detective Harris?

And can she also avoid falling onto the radar of Mina and Ray?

Taylor and his screenwriter Amanda Iko clearly want their film to be viewed in the same light as the Coen Brothers'  'Fargo' and 'The Man Who Wasn't There' and Gus Van Sandt's 'To Die For'.

However 'Breaking News in Yuba County' lacks those films' narrative guile and their visual panache.

Despite its cast's best efforts, the film also feels oddly dated.

Its small town inept criminals tale might have felt original in the 1990s but now it feels stale.

Taylor and Iko also appear either unable or unwilling to give the genre a 21st Century twist, going through the motions of  a tired rehash of much better crime films.

Sue's hastily cobbled together narrative for the media about Karl's disappearance is unconvincing - a fact rammed home by an incredibly one dimensional performance by Juliette Lewis as the local celebrity reporter Gloria Michaels.

Lewis delivers a poor impersonation of Nicole Kidman's Suzanne Stone in 'To Die For' minus that character's deviousness or depth.

Although Lewis can probably blame some of that on Iko's poorly crafted screenplay which leaves her with no option but to play the TV reporter as vacuous.

Mila Kunis fares little better as the other TV reporter and not only do you suspect Taylor and Iko have little regard for local news reporters but they show little real understanding of how reporters operate.

Would a journalist whose half sister is apparently distraught over the disappearance of her husband really be allowed by her news station to interview her?

Janney tries her best to keep the audience guessing whether Sue is a naive fool with a tendency to get lucky or much more cunning.

Awkwafina, Collins Jr, Simpson, Modine, Hall, Barkin, Sykes, Everett, Wiley, Sim, Chris Lowell as a bank clerk and TC Matherne as Detective Harris' colleague Officer Jones do their bit with half baked roles.

Ultimately, though, they are all let down by a derivative script and by Taylor's extremely flat direction which has nothing original to offer a well worn genre.

It's hard to believe that a director can make a movie only 96 minutes long feel like it is dragged out.

But with material as flimsy as this, 'Breaking News in Yuba County' is a bit like the Norwegian blue in Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot' sketch.

It is being passed off as a fun caper but we all know a Dead Parrot when we see one.

('Breaking News in Yuba County' was released in US cinemas on February 12, 2021 and for streaming on Sky Cinema and Now TV in the UK on October 15, 2021)

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