You've got to hand it to Destination Films. Since they leapt on the scene last fall with Bats, they've been churning out movies in big studio fashion. In the rush, though, it seems a few things have been overlooked. Like good material. Their newest entry Drowning Mona is somewhere between good and bad, a harmless and pointless romp of a white trash murder mystery in which everyone is a suspect because the victim was so dearly hated.

Dearly is the operative word here as in Mona Dearly (Bette Midler), long-time surly resident of Verplanck, New York. To put it mildly, no one likes Mona, so when her car goes over a road divider and lands her in the Hudson River, her passing isn't mourned. In fact, everyone seems to be celebrating, much to the surprise of local police chief Wyatt Rash (Danny Devito). There's her son Jeff (Marcus Thomas) and her husband Phil (William Fichtner), who have put up with her abuse for years. There's local waitress Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is sleeping with both Jeff and Phil. There's Jeff's business partner Bobby (Casey Affleck), who can't get rid of lazy boy Jeff because he's Mona's baby, and Bobby's fiancée Ellen (Neve Campbell), who sees her future husband's prospects fading unless he can dump Jeff.

So, as the trailer says, it's not so much a question of whodunit, but who didn't? Police chief Rash does his darndest to smoke out the killer once Mona's death is dubbed a murder, but he's stymied and more than a little bit relieved himself. After all, he never much liked Mona either and Ellen is his daughter. Still, justice must be served and, to that end, he considers everyone in town a suspect. Enter the ubiquitous use of flashbacks as everyone tells of their personal grudges with Mrs. D. Even with the flashbacks and an assortment of filler scenes, there simply isn't much going on in this film. It's a whodunit in which people don't really do anything.

Luckily, writer Peter Steinfeld does divert our attention from the feeble plot by offering up some amusing tidbits in crafting the town of Verplanck. For instance, everyone in town, including the police chief, drives a Yugo, that forgettable little rust bucket from the 1980s. And there are more gardeners per capita in Verplanck than there are lawns to mow or trees to trim. This quirky sensibility, which carries over into the characters, saves the movie from being a complete wash. And then too there's Steinfeld's admittedly original and often nasty humor. For instance, when Jeff hears that Mona died in his car, all he wants to know is "What was she doing in my car?"

What kills this film more than anything is the lack of energy in it. Somehow director Nick Gomez has managed to take what should be a maniacal little comedy and reduced it to a plodding, stagnant melodrama. Scenes more often than not feel empty with the actors standing about looking for something to do. Gomez' style, learned from the independent film world and from TV shows like Oz and The Sopranos seems out of sync with the colorful world of Verplanck. Instead of creating a comic book world of silliness, he tries to craft a dark, but funny look at white trash America. It's the wrong choice and it shows.