Barry Wetcher/Columbia Pictures
Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant play New Yorkers
sent off to cowboy country.

There are barely enough titter-worthy one-liners in Marc Lawrence’s good-natured romantic comedy “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” to prevent it from sinking under the weight of its clichés. Most of the throwaway witticisms drop from the pursed lips of Hugh Grant, playing Paul Morgan, a New York lawyer with Oxonian airs reluctantly transplanted to a tiny Wyoming town as part of the federal witness protection program.

After he and his wife, Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker), a high-end New York real-estate broker, accidentally see the murder of an international arms dealer and are spotted by the killer (Michael Kelly), they have no choice but to be whisked away to cowboy country under the pseudonyms Paul and Meryl Foster. Their hosts, the laconic, growly voiced United States Marshal Clay Wheeler (Sam Elliott) and his rootin’-tootin’ cowgirl wife, Emma (Mary Steenburgen), teach the effete city slickers the simpler, more wholesome ways of the West. They also show these spoiled, high-maintenance neurotics how to have a relationship. Their secret? Just shut up and make it work!

The sleeping arrangements in the Morgans’ temporary refuge are dicey because of one major complication: Paul and Meryl have separated. Meryl won’t forgive her husband for a one-night stand, despite his pleading and groveling to be taken back. As she harangues him about his breach of trust, you are acutely aware that the shelf life of Carrie Bradshaw and her knockoffs is on the verge of expiration. Despite Ms. Parker’s strenuous efforts to charm, Meryl comes across as a shrill, self-centered middle-aged nag. Behavior that appeared kooky and cute at 34 seems pathologically immature a decade later.

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