Review of Welcome to Mooseport (2004) by Dawdlingpoet — 28 Nov 2021

This is a pretty corny and sentimental movie but it is also mildly amusing. The roles are less than challenging, especially for Ray Romano and Maura Tierney, who's characters are similar to the ones their most famous for ie Ray Romano plays the goofy, bumbling guy next door type, quite similar to Ray Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond, whereas Maura Tierney plays a pretty headstrong and stand-off'ish character in Sally, similar to her character of Abbey Lockhart in ER.

Its quite amusing watching some scnees with the President having to deal with his ex wife Charlotte (played by Christine Baranski), who makes things awkward for him and scenes like one of the President debating against 'Handy' Harold with the two of them playing rock, scissors, stone.

It is pretty sentimental and slushy in parts, with Harold trying to win back Sally and her trying to show him that things have changed etc. though it is still pretty enjoyable never the less and though it hardly breaks any new ground, you should find yourself chuckling at some points in the movie, which makes it worth watching if it comes on TV at some point, though I wouldn't say that its worth spending all that much on the DVD. Its basically an average to pretty decent all round inoffensive, light hearted family movie, that isn't really anything all that new but isn't entirely fall right asleep boring either.

If you like Ray Romano in Everybody Loves Raymond, then you should enjoy this. I also thought that it was quite funny to see Gene Hackman play such a comedic role, as before I only knew of him from action movies, so this seems to be something a little different for him but I feel he did quite well at playing the President, who comes off as a light hearted and jolly sort of a guy. There are points in the movie where either him or his aides suggest doing things that are less than fair or wholesome and when this happens, another character is quite shocked and tries to dissaude him and its there that the political aspect comes into play I suppose, to highlight some elements of corruption present in politics.

If you can stand the sentimentality and dont mind seeing Ray and Maura play somewhat similar characters, then you should get some light laughs from this. Its nothing much to write home about per se but the story is enough to keep you pretty interested to watch through to the end, it could be categorised as generally light comedy fluff but as that, its pretty good.