Farcical ‘Breaking News’ attracts mixed reviews

Above: Awkwafina and Allison Janney star in the movie “Breaking News in Yuba County.” (Photo: American International Pictures)

It’s not all that often that you read movie reviews that are so different you wonder whether the two critics live on the same planet. That, though, is the case with the two reviews that I found of a movie that begins streaming Friday on Vudu and other streaming sites.

The movie is titled “Breaking News in Yuba County,” and it was directed by Tate Taylor from a script by Amanda Idoko. It stars a respectable cast that includes Allison Janney, Mila Kunis, Awkwafina, Juliette Lewis, Matthew Modine, Ellen Barkin, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall.

Janney (the former “West Wing” cast member who won a Best Supporting Acting Oscar for 2017’s “I, Tonya”) stars as the lay-about wife of low-level crook Modine. When he dies, she sees the chance to achieve a bit of fame by pretending that he has mysteriously disappeared.

First, let’s consider what Variety critic Peter Debruge has to say – not that what he wrote is all good. At best, Debruge gives the film a grudging OK, pointing out that Idoko’s script (then titled simply “Breaking News”) drew the attention of producer Franklin Leonard.

“But like all scripts,” Debruge wrote, “something changed en route to the screen – certain characters tweaked, various details rethought – and the result is rather more uneven than such a sprawling group effort requires.”

Still, Debruge added, the “screenplay does a fairly steady job of surprising, creating more than a dozen memorable characters, whom Taylor has cast with a terrific variety of comedic talents …” including Janney et al.

Writing for the New York Times, critic Glenn Kenny has a far harsher take, claiming that Taylor’s film “gives one the sinking feeling that Janney actually likes starring in facile lampoons of suburbia.”

If that isn’t bad enough, Kenny goes on to describe the film as an “amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.”

You, of course, may come to a far different conclusion – if you’re brave enough to watch, that is.