One for the Money *

Review by Paul Stathakis  |  March 5, 2012

‘But where is the humor?’

Accord­ing to Lion­s­gate, “One for the Money” is a com­edy. But did they ever make a mis­take in mar­ket­ing it as so. I say this because “One for the Money” is a train wreck of a com­edy, a wit­less film with enough robotically-delivered dia­logue to make your head spin, and it fails mis­er­ably as a comedic fea­ture because it is, unless I missed some­thing, com­pletely devoid of humour. The worst part is that I’m not even mildly exag­ger­at­ing. Any time you find your­self hav­ing more fun point­ing out all the cliches in a film rather than fol­low­ing it, it’s a clear sign of a sure mis­fire. That’s the kind of expe­ri­ence you get watch­ing this abysmal pic­ture. Unless of course a grand­mother acci­den­tally open­ing fire on a cooked turkey is your idea of a fun time at the movies.

Kather­ine Heigl, usu­ally charm­ing but not here, stars as Stephanie Plum, a newly-divorced and unem­ployed woman who accepts a job at her cousin’s bail-bond busi­ness. Her first assign­ment: to find wanted local cop Joe Morelli who we quickly find out was once roman­ti­cally linked to Plum. Nat­u­rally, there has to be a con­nec­tion between the man and the woman or we wouldn’t have a love story to cling to. A reward of 50,000 dol­lars is enough to moti­vate Plum to catch and bring Morelli in alive. What fol­lows is a silly hour and a half of cat-in-tongue dia­logue, sex­ual innu­en­does, and at least one scene with Heigl wrapped in a towel.

The writ­ers also do their best to incor­po­rate some action but even those scenes come across as ridicu­lous. At one point, Heigl vis­its a mixed mar­tial arts train­ing gym to get some leads. Soon after she finds her­self trapped inside an octa­gon ring with a short-fused fighter who taunts her as she inter­ro­gates him. She man­ages to escape in what is eas­ily the year’s most use­less and ran­dom action scene.Who saves her? You guessed it, the very same man she’s pur­su­ing. She points a gun at him moments after he saves her but he is able to snatch the weapon from her after he con­vinces her to lower it. Then she asks him for infor­ma­tion. She says, “I gave you my gun, give me some­thing.” Morelli approaches her and flirts, “Oh, I’ll give you some­thing.” Right, we get it. By the end we know they’ll be together though we can’t pos­si­bly believe for one moment that these two indi­vid­u­als are right for each other.

Why Heigl accepted to be in this film besides the promise of a pay­check is puz­zling. In pre­vi­ous films like “Knocked Up” (2007) and “The Ugly Truth” (2009), Heigl proved she could charm­ing and funny. Her role in “One for the Money” is so insipid and tedious that one might eas­ily for­get that, as an actress, she’s actu­ally quite capa­ble of reveal­ing such qual­i­ties on the big screen.