Nick Beam (Tim Robbins) is having a bad day. The mild-mannered Los Angeles-based advertising executive has just come home to find his beautiful wife Ann (the late Kelly Preston) in bed with his greedy boss Phillip (Michael McKean). Rather than confront them, he gets in his four-wheel-drive Chevy Yukon and drives off aimlessly onto the L. A. freeway where he makes a wrong turn and winds up in one of the high-crime parts of the city, and, when you thought his day couldn't get any worse, he gets carjacked by T (Martin Lawrence), who is not as dangerous as he appears and is more talk than walk.
"Boy, did you pick the wrong guy on the wrong day," Nick says, and he floors it through the city, and T faints from the shock of it all. Before we know it, we're in the middle of the Arizona desert. After several fisticuffs and other comic mishaps, the pair realize that they are not what they appear to be to the other: Nick is 100% a coward and awfully presumptuous about social issues, but displays resiliency, and T is unemployed and non-threatening but is quite knowledgeable about electrical engineering. They put their heads together and realizing that they have Nothing To Lose, they conspire to drive back to L. A. and rob Nick's boss Phillip as revenge for sleeping with his wife. In the process, they also run afoul of two born-to-kill hardened criminals, Rig (John C. McGinley) and Charlie (Giancarlo Esposito).
"Nothing to Lose" came to us from "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" writer-director Steve Oedekerk, who also appears in a cameo role late in the film as a lip-syncing, dancing security guard. With "Nothing to Lose," Oedekerk aims for a slightly higher, slightly more ambitious brand of comedy, which is not only of the "R"-rated variety, but also taking aim at the lead characters' socially-ingrained assumptions about one another and breaking down cultural and societal barriers (which, no matter how well-intentioned it is, does not always work and can come off as quite forced at times). While the black-white "buddy movie" dynamic is nothing new, the unlikely pairing and on-screen chemistry of Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins keeps the movie going.
"Nothing to Lose" was the other of two big-budget action-comedies released in 1997; the other film was the Brett Ratner-directed Chris Tucker/Charlie Sheen vehicle "Money Talks." Both were films that I remember fondly from my early teenage years when they were first released on home video and I watched them repeatedly with my late mother.
8/10.
"Boy, did you pick the wrong guy on the wrong day," Nick says, and he floors it through the city, and T faints from the shock of it all. Before we know it, we're in the middle of the Arizona desert. After several fisticuffs and other comic mishaps, the pair realize that they are not what they appear to be to the other: Nick is 100% a coward and awfully presumptuous about social issues, but displays resiliency, and T is unemployed and non-threatening but is quite knowledgeable about electrical engineering. They put their heads together and realizing that they have Nothing To Lose, they conspire to drive back to L. A. and rob Nick's boss Phillip as revenge for sleeping with his wife. In the process, they also run afoul of two born-to-kill hardened criminals, Rig (John C. McGinley) and Charlie (Giancarlo Esposito).
"Nothing to Lose" came to us from "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" writer-director Steve Oedekerk, who also appears in a cameo role late in the film as a lip-syncing, dancing security guard. With "Nothing to Lose," Oedekerk aims for a slightly higher, slightly more ambitious brand of comedy, which is not only of the "R"-rated variety, but also taking aim at the lead characters' socially-ingrained assumptions about one another and breaking down cultural and societal barriers (which, no matter how well-intentioned it is, does not always work and can come off as quite forced at times). While the black-white "buddy movie" dynamic is nothing new, the unlikely pairing and on-screen chemistry of Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins keeps the movie going.
"Nothing to Lose" was the other of two big-budget action-comedies released in 1997; the other film was the Brett Ratner-directed Chris Tucker/Charlie Sheen vehicle "Money Talks." Both were films that I remember fondly from my early teenage years when they were first released on home video and I watched them repeatedly with my late mother.
8/10.