Road movies of any stripe are typically a treat, but when filmmakers
combine the endless possibilities of the open road with the subtle
annoyances of travelers, comedy is practically guaranteed--be it as silly
as Kingpin, as mainstream as Planes, Trains and Automobiles, or as sublime
as Flirting With Disaster. The latest of these, Steve Oedekerk's Nothing to
Lose, attempts to combine a caper movie with a road comedy in the mold of
Midnight Run. Tim Robbins stars as an advertising design consultant who is
shaken from his secure upper-middle-class Los Angeleno lifestyle when he
happens upon his wife in the throes of passion with his boss. Driving along
in a funk, he wanders into a run-down neighborhood and is startled by
carjacker Martin Lawrence. Unwilling to be taken, Robbins locks the doors,
steps on the accelerator, and drives Lawrence to Arizona.
Robbins is a fine comic actor, with a gift for turning tight-ass anger
into dry comic timing. Lawrence is looser, with a zany energy that often
jolts viewers into laughter even when his material isn't that funny.
Together, they're a hoot, especially when Robbins' desperation leads him to
middle-manage Lawrence's criminal activity. Soon they've earned the
attention of the cops, and of another pair of Route 66 bandits (Giancarlo
Esposito and John C. McGinley), who are upset that neophytes are working
their desert.
The problem with Nothing to Lose is that, as good as the
chemistry between Robbins and Lawrence is, and as laugh-out-loud funny as
their banter often is, it takes more than jokes and personalities to make a
movie. What's required is some kind of momentum, something to drive
the picture--a plot that makes sense, or is at least credible enough to
sustain high jinks. This is a lesson that Oedekerk, who wrote and directed
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, has yet to learn. Nothing to
Lose has funny scenes that too often descend to drawn guns and shouted
profanity; the director's imagination seems to disappear on the heels of
his inspiration.
A major miscalculation occurs when Oedekerk steers his costars off the
highway. Halfway through the film, Robbins and Lawrence return to L.A., and
Nothing to Lose abandons its anarchic, anything-for-a-laugh spirit.
We visit Lawrence's home and learn that he's actually a misunderstood
family man and an unemployed electronics whiz. (Why a brilliant engineer
would need an ad exec to plan his robberies is a question I'd better not
ask). Meanwhile, Robbins learns some things about himself that make him
second-guess the crime spree. And so the movie runs out of gas; one last
big job for the twosome is good for a couple of grins, but Oedekerk, in
turning back on his head-out-for-the-horizon premise, has eliminated every
element of surprise. He's not going to take us from Point A to Point B;
he's heading back to point A, where everything will be restored to bland,
uninteresting normalcy.
For a road comedy to work, we in the audience have to feel that anything
might happen. Once Nothing to Lose does its narrative U-turn, we see
the rest of the film laid out for us like a map. Despite the title,
Nothing to Lose plays it stultifyingly safe.
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