NOTHING TO LOSE (Touchstone) Starring: Tim Robbins, Martin Lawrence, John C. McGinley, Giancarlo Esposito, Kelly Preston. Screenplay: Steve Oedekerk. Producers: Martin Bregman, Dan Jinks, Michael Bregman. Director: Steve Oedekerk. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In Hollywood, the place where paradigms reign and conceptual blockbusting goes to die, among the most hallowed of paradigms is the 90 minute running time. You may be able to get away with 85, and five or ten fewer for an animated feature, but anything less would appear to risk rending the very fabric of space-time. Never mind that a popular 45-minute film, with its potential for nine or ten cut-rate showings a day plus concession sales from twice as many intermissions, would be an exhibitor's fantasy. The 90-Minute Mandate exists for one fairly obvious, and fairly depressing, reason: it's less complicated for studios to keep throwing money at bloated, mediocre films than it is for them to figure out how to make and market shorter, better ones.
NOTHING TO LOSE could have been a hilarious 30 or 40 minutes of comic film-making. Instead, it's an over-stuffed 97 minutes, not because it should have been but because it _had_ to be. The premise is solid enough: upper-crust L. A. ad executive Nick Beam (Tim Robbins) comes home from work one day to find his wife (Kelly Preston) in bed with is boss. Devastated, Nick begins driving aimlessly through the city, until he is accosted at a stop light by rookie car-jacker T. Paul (Martin Lawrence). Much to T. Paul's chagrin, however, Nick does not go gentle. Instead, he kidnaps the would-be assailant, beginning a road trip of armed robbery, mistaken identity and buddy bonding which will take the pair from L. A. to Arizona and back again before they launch a plot for revenge against Nick's arrogant boss.
Along the way, writer-director Steve Oedekerk places Nick and T. Paul into some bizarre and truly inventive situations. One scene finds a terrified hardware store clerk asked to compare the respective hold-up stylings of Nick and T-Paul; another lets Oedekerk himself kick up his heels as a security guard who uses an empty office building to practice his dance moves. At odd moments, NOTHING TO LOSE will catch you off guard with a memorable supporting performance or an unpredictable punch line.
Since Oedekerk is a veteran of stand-up comedy and sketch writing for "In Living Color," it should be surprising that hit-and-run gags play to his strengths. Nor should it be surprising that the length of a feature film does not. He fills the spaces between clever comic moments with sub-plots which probably were meant to provide "depth," but instead merely provide "length." T-Paul, it seems, is no criminal, merely a computer whiz who can't catch a break; Nick, in turn, is actually an oblivious white-collar in need of racial enlightenment. This lame attempt at social commentary robs both characters of the edge which would have made a shorter, sharper NOTHING TO LOSE crackle with creativity. Tim Robbins as just another uptight liberal-in-training is a bore. Martin Lawrence as a sympathetic family man is a strain on credulity like a tractor-trailer is a strain on a Vespa.
NOTHING TO LOSE really disintegrates when Oedekerk spends valuable minutes on a feud between our protagonists and a pair of tough guy outlaws (John C. McGinley and Giancarlo Esposito). Every scene between them drags the film to a crawl, making you long for a version of NOTHING TO LOSE in which Oedekerk simply let Nick and T-Paul go off on their own unlikely crime spree, free of sentimentality. Ninety-seven minutes gives him too much time to search for a happy ending, one which would have been much happier for all involved if it had come an hour earlier.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 crime times: 4.
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