Grade: B-

I don't know how else to put this: "Bernie" is sort of a movie for older folks. More specifically: older folks with a penchant for some good ol' fashioned Southern-fried jokes. I don't mean that in a bad way, exactly. I just feel like I should put it out there, in the interest of full disclosure. Since I didn't realize it until it was much too late for me to trade in my ticket for... oh, I don't know. My money back.

Just to get you up to speed: Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) is a much-adored small-town funeral director with a finger in every Carthage, Texas pie, so to speak. He leads the church choir with tear-jerking renditions of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” directs showstopping community theatre productions, delivers seminars on the criminally under-appreciated art of embalming (“You wouldn't want a mechanic to have the nails of a flight attendant, would you?”), and waddles endearingly onto the porches of all the grieving widows in town, bearing gift baskets thoughtfully stuffed with everything from bath salts to homemade sweet potato pie.

Things go awry when Bernie becomes intimately involved (um, financially-speaking) with a prickly (and very rich) older widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) — but the town of Carthage has Bernie's back, even in the face of the most shocking accusations perpetuated by local district attorney-cum-wannabe bounty hunter Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey).

The filmmakers cobble together a variety of techniques to tell this tale: (way too many) talking-head-style faux-interviews with the townspeople, flashbacks, musical montages, ordinary dramatic sequences, and plenty of unnecessary and awkwardly-placed title cards. The end result is a muddled-up mess that feels more like a bad 20/20 spoof than a truly engaging story — or, for that matter, a story worth telling with a six million-dollar budget and a handful of talented actors rather than in the couple of minutes you're stuck at a stoplight.

It's funny, because director Richard Linklater actually got it right when he admitted to IndieWire in a 2011 interview that the screenplay was a boring read: “The gossip element almost kept the film from being made, because it reads boring. I said, 'But they'll be funny characters. I could just imagine the accents.”

Well, that pretty much sums it up. Too much of the hoped-for humor relies on “funny Texan accents” and the overall idea of how the real-life events played out... but the laughs simply are not present in the actual writing. The screenplay is weak and redundant. “Bernie” works all right as a character study, maybe, but would it be very good at all if Jack Black wasn't in it? Probably not.

The audience — which, I feel compelled to add, was made up overwhelmingly of giddy, grey-haired almost-octogenarians — seemed to get a real kick out of all the garbled mispronunciations of “Les Miserables” and granny panty gags. I exaggerate... a little. The east Texas locals are certainly colorful and have their amusing moments, but it's just... not funny enough. Which brings me to my main complaint about this film: it can't seem to figure out what it wants to be. Is it an eccentric mockumentary a la Christopher Guest or a plainer biopic? A black comedy or more of a poignant dramedy? It's one of those stranger-than-fiction true stories, yes — but at the same time, it's somehow not strange enough to hold your attention quite long enough.