Nothing to Lose (1997) Touchstone/Action-Comedy RT: 98 minutes Rated R (pervasive strong language and a sex scene) Director: Steve Oedekerk Screenplay: Steve Oedekerk Music: Robert Folk Cinematography: Donald E. Thorn Release date: July 18, 1997 (US) Martin Lawrence, Tim Robbins, John C. McGinley, Giancarlo Esposito, Kelly Preston, Michael McKean, Rebecca Gayheart, Susan Barnes, Irma P. Hall, Marcus Paulk, Penny Bae Bridges, Steve Oedekerk. Box Office: $44.5M (US)
Rating: * ½
Nothing to Lose…. except the 98 minutes of your life you’ll never get back after watching this unfunny buddy comedy.
The funniest thing about Nothing to Lose, a pointless action-comedy pairing Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence as unlikely partners-in-crime, is that I remember liking it more when I saw it in summer ’97. Maybe I was in a good mood that night, I don’t know. This time I hardly laughed and the one time I did, I think it may have been going for some kind of pathos. What’s truly tragic is that it didn’t have to be this way.
The set-up is fairly labored. Through a series of contrivances, successful advertising executive Nick Beam (Robbins, Bull Durham) thinks his wife Ann (Preston, Twins) is cheating on him with his boss (McKean, This Is Spinal Tap). Let’s examine this scenario for a moment. It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out he’s misreading the situation. It happens all the time in these movies. Entire plots are built on such misunderstandings. Earlier, his wife told him her sister would be visiting the following week with her fiancee. He’s never met this sister before so he has no idea what she looks like. Ever hear of photographs, pal? ANYWAY, isn’t it possible the woman he sees having sex in his bed is the sister? Isn’t it also possible the wife got the date of her visit wrong? Furthermore, isn’t it possible the guy in bed with her isn’t his boss? All he has to go on is pair of monogrammed cuff links that could have been left at his house at any time say last year’s Christmas party. Couldn’t the man in his bed be the sister’s fiancé? All evidence of an alleged affair is circumstantial at best. Of course, if that logic was followed, we wouldn’t have a movie.
In any event, Nick believes Ann has been unfaithful. Understandably hurt, he drives off in his SUV to think things over and ends up in the inner city where he’s carjacked by T. Paul (Lawrence, Bad Boys). Nick turns to the wannabe thief and says “Boy, did you pick the wrong guy on the wrong day.” before taking him on a wild suicide ride through the busy streets of L.A. It ends in the Arizona desert where Nick, sans cash and credit cards, must strike a deal with T. Paul in order for both of them to get back to L.A. They don’t like each other very much and it only gets worse when T. Paul robs a gas station for travel money making Nick his unwitting accomplice.
What follows is a series of mishaps and dangerous encounters with a pair of real criminals, Rig (McGinley, Point Break) and Charlie (Esposito, Do the Right Thing), as they make their way home. Along the way, they decide to team up and rob Nick’s boss out of revenge. It’s a perfect plan; Nick knows the combination to his safe (?!) and T. Paul is an electrical engineer who knows his way around security systems. With their combined knowledge, their mission should be an easy one. That is, unless a couple of real crooks decide to follow them and muck it all up.
Directed by Steve Oedekerk (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls), Nothing to Lose is as generic and cliched as buddy movies come. BTW, it’s not just a buddy movie; it’s also a road trip movie, a fish-out-of-water comedy, a mistaken identity movie and a corporate heist thriller. It tries to be all of these things and fails across the board. The teaming of Lawrence and Robbins isn’t exactly inspired. Although loud and laid-back usually make for good bedfellows, it doesn’t happen here. What the story needs is for the white guy to be uptight and the black guy to be a street smart wise ass. Oedekerk should have played up the comic side of their characters. Instead, he plays it down in order to make some misguided statement about how racist corporate America keeps low-income black people down in spite of their qualifications. It doesn’t really come through.
As a comedy, Nothing to Lose simply doesn’t work. Joke after joke lands with an echoing thud. The only time it’s funny is when Irma P. Hall (A Family Thing) is on-screen and that’s a problem. She appears in only two scenes. The first is when T. Paul comes home after his unscheduled road trip with Nick who he brings with him. We get to see him with his wife (angry at the moment) and two kids. We see how much T. Paul loves his family. We also find out that despite his qualifications, nobody will hire him thus the reason he resorts to crime. This scene should have rang with pathos but it’s undermined by Hall who comes out and slaps both men, T. Paul for being out so late getting into trouble and Nick because he was with him. It’s funny, but misplaced.
To be fair, I also semi-chuckled at the scene where a lip-synching security guard (played by Oedekerk) delays the guys in carrying out the robbery by “performing” for nearly an hour. That’s it. I can honestly say I’ve seen worse than Nothing to Lose but I’ve also seen better. In retrospect, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to call it a bad movie. It’s more of an unnecessary one. There’s really no reason for it. It doesn’t even work as light-hearted mid-summer entertainment. Disposable is another adjective that definitely applies to it. The script should have been disposed in favor of a funnier, smarter one. Any way you look it, it’s the viewer that loses.
