I hate Katherine Heigl a lot less than most critics do. In fact, I don’t hate her at all; I kind of like her. I enjoyed her stupid baby movie (Life as We Know It) a little bit, and I loved her in Knocked Up.
Granted, all of her other starring vehicles blew ass, but she’s routinely better than her material—and such is the case with her latest bottom-feeder, One for the Money.
Heigl is slightly bad, yet still somewhat charming, as Stephanie Plum, a former Macy’s employee who goes into the bail-bond business. Her first gig is to go after a cop in trouble, Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara), the guy to whom she lost her virginity. Later, she tried to run over him with a car.
Heigl, of course, didn’t have a hand in the writing of this crap. The film is based on the first in a popular string of novels by Janet Evanovich, and my guess is that director Julie Anne Robinson missed something in the translation from book to film. The movie is a dull dud.
Much of the blame can go to Robinson, who directs with all the finesse of a drunken three-legged polar bear on ice skates. Almost nothing in this film works. All attempts at humor fall flat, with Heigl and O’Mara generating zero onscreen chemistry.
O’Mara is an actor who can irritate with the reading of every line. He’s just so intense. This is a guy who must visit the catering table for coffee a lot during the shoot.
They got Debbie Reynolds out of mothballs to play the crazy grandma who shoots turkeys at the kitchen table. (I guess Betty White wasn’t available—or perhaps she thought the script was a piece of shit.) Fisher Stevens shows up late in the film as a sweaty bounty hunter. If that isn’t a harbinger of a bad film, what is?
The movie is populated with your standard bounty-hunter movie clichés. There’s the hooker with a heart of gold (Sherri Shepherd) from whom Stephanie gets all of her information in exchange for hoagies. There’s the doting, paranoid mother (Debra Monk) who worries when her daughter is five minutes late for dinner. There’s the appliance-store guy (Adam Paul) her mama is trying to fix her up with, even though he’s a total dick.
OK, so most of those roles don’t show up in your average bounty-hunter movie. I guess One for the Money just has a way of making everything feel tired and clichéd. The hooker with a heart of gold who eats hoagies is in just about every romantic comedy with guns ever made, though. I won’t back off that argument.
As Ranger, the stud who shows Stephanie the ropes and saves her ass multiple times, Daniel Sunjata is the film’s one bright spot. He’s funny and has an actual rapport with Heigl; he needed more screen time. The film goes dark whenever he leaves the screen; perhaps he should’ve been cast as the lead over O’Mara.
The whole thing is set in New Jersey (although much of it was shot in Pittsburgh), which means one thing: Bad Jersey accents. Everybody’s got one, and Jersey should be pissed.
Heigl’s string of bad luck continues, and it’s no surprise she recently said she’d like to return to do a guest spot on Grey’s Anatomy. The big screen hasn’t been kind to her.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2012.
“all of her other starring vehicles blew ass”
“didn’t have a hand in the writing of this crap”
“I guess Betty White wasn’t available—or perhaps she thought the script was a piece of shit.”
“even though he’s a total dick.”
“the stud who shows Stephanie the ropes and saves her ass multiple times”
“Jersey should be pissed.”
That’s six — count ’em, six — references to feces, urine, buttocks, and genitalia. Thanks for the creativity, Grimm.
Hahahahahaha!
So’s I’m watchin’ the latest flick from Katie Heigl. Lemme tell ya, that dame’s eyes are too far apart. Can’t trust a fish-facey mug like that, though I’d still bone her. Who wouldn’t?
See, the problem with that Katie Hi-girl is her movies are always mounds of turdage. Katie took a dump on her “Gray’s Proctology” gig. Then she’s in “Knackered Up” and what the fock does the bizzatch do in an interview? Drops a loaf on Judd Appachow, calling his sh*t “sexist.” So yeah, Katie’s a real ballbuster.
Anyhoo, here’s Katie’s new slab of sh*it-ema, “One for the Monkey.” She plays a bail-bondsman, kinda when Ma’am Grier was in “Jockey Brown” playing opposite Robert Forskin. Lil’ Katie Hi-Girl ain’t as bitchin’ as Grier and there sure as shag ain’t no Quentin Tarantoenail at the helm. No way, this is a jive-ass production of the likes not seen since the last time Cameron Diaz threw a bulimiac slumber party. Talk about ho-bags in sleeping-bags.
I’m all up in the front row of the theater and my rear shanks get to itchin’. That’s how I know this movie sucks rectal tunnel like a meth hooker on a silly straw. Speaking of the oldest profession, “One (Handjob) for the Money” has a character who is a hooker with a blood-pumper of precious metal, or “heart of gold” as the confused leprechauns say. She will even turn (verbal) tricks in exchange for Eegee’s sandwiches. No word on her policy toward Eegee’s jizzy fries.
“Eve Plumb for the Money” is the worst toilet-load of accumulated excrement I’ve ever seen outside of the Reese Withered-poon films they showed me when I was strapped down and my eyes clamped open for reprogramming. Real whorer-show.
This movie is like a drunken polar bear on roller skates who has taken LSD and is pirouetting with vomit spraying out of its mouth which is soaked with blood from the campers it mauled who had really bad B.O. and the polar bear has an ear infection and a bad case of fleas and he falls through the ice and dies and that’s some tragic shiat, yo.