More Smug Than Smart

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2017)

In the trailer for this Frances McDormand comes off as a bawdy force of nature and I was eager to see the story in which her character lived. It began with an intriguing premise, but soon enough devolved into a shoddy bag of easy cliches and trite caricatures. While McDormand is mostly great, the material did not remain worthy of her talent. The cops are racists, black people are oppressed, little people are demeaned, innocent people are beaten without consequence and another is arrested and jailed for two joints - in 2017, while arson and wife beating are winked at by seemingly oblivious yokels. All of this is seemingly in service to director McDonagh's seeming belief that small-town America is most clearly defined by its defects and those defects are rampant pathologies. If that's true, he doesn't prove it with glib mockery and snide derision masked as social commentary. Add in the plot holes big enough to erect a billboard in and the whole thing crumbles into an exercise in snark.