{"id":6994,"date":"2024-10-25T11:39:51","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T15:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=6994"},"modified":"2024-10-25T11:39:51","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T15:39:51","slug":"nothing-to-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/25\/nothing-to-lose\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing to Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Nothing to Lose<\/strong> (1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Touchstone\/Action-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 98 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (pervasive strong language and a sex scene)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Steve Oedekerk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Steve Oedekerk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Robert Folk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Donald E. Thorn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: July 18, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $44.5M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: * \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0Nothing to Lose<\/strong>…. except the 98 minutes of your life you\u2019ll never get back after watching this unfunny buddy comedy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The funniest thing about Nothing to Lose<\/strong>, 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 \u201997. Maybe I was in a good mood that night, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s truly tragic is that it didn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u2019s examine this scenario for a moment. It doesn\u2019t take an Einstein to figure out he\u2019s 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\u2019s never met this sister before so he has no idea what she looks like. Ever hear of photographs, pal? ANYWAY, isn\u2019t it possible the woman he sees having sex in his bed is the sister? Isn\u2019t it also possible the wife got the date of her visit wrong? Furthermore, isn\u2019t it possible the guy in bed with her isn\u2019t 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\u2019s Christmas party. Couldn\u2019t the man in his bed be the sister\u2019s fianc\u00e9? All evidence of an alleged affair is circumstantial at best. Of course, if that logic was followed, we wouldn\u2019t have a movie.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In 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\u2019s carjacked by T. Paul (Lawrence, Bad Boys). Nick turns to the wannabe thief and says \u201cBoy, did you pick the wrong guy on the wrong day.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0What 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\u2019s boss out of revenge. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Directed by Steve Oedekerk (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls), Nothing to Lose<\/strong> is as generic and cliched as buddy movies come. BTW, it\u2019s not just a buddy movie; it\u2019s 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\u2019t exactly inspired. Although loud and laid-back usually make for good bedfellows, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t really come through.<\/p>\n

\u00a0As a comedy, Nothing to Lose<\/strong> simply doesn\u2019t work. Joke after joke lands with an echoing thud. The only time it\u2019s funny is when Irma P. Hall (A Family Thing) is on-screen and that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s funny, but misplaced.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To 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 \u201cperforming\u201d for nearly an hour. That\u2019s it. I can honestly say I\u2019ve seen worse than Nothing to Lose<\/strong> but I\u2019ve also seen better. In retrospect, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s entirely accurate to call it a bad movie. It\u2019s more of an unnecessary one. There\u2019s really no reason for it. It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s the viewer that loses.\"\"<\/p>\n

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Nothing to Lose (1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Touchstone\/Action-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 98 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (pervasive strong language and a sex scene)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Steve Oedekerk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Steve Oedekerk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Robert Folk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Donald E. Thorn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: July 18, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Martin Lawrence, Tim Robbins, John C. McGinley, Giancarlo Esposito, Kelly Preston, Michael McKean, Rebecca Gayheart, Susan Barnes, Irma P. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Nothing-to-Lose-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6994"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7310,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6994\/revisions\/7310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}