Until now, I’ve only given one movie — out of the two dozen or so films I’ve reviewed for the guide over the last few years — a rating of one star. That review, in case you’re wondering, was for a mercifully forgotten British war film called Centurion. The only compliment I could muster up about Centurion is that the blood looked pretty realistic. Unfortunately, that’s one more compliment than I can bring myself to write in defense of One for the Money.
Perhaps my judgment is clouded by bad self-haircut-induced despair, but One for the Money is a horrible movie — it has received only three percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, so I know I’m not alone in this opinion. It’s not horrible in a so-bad-it’s-funny kind of way like Centurion; it’s just boring. It’s a suspense-lacking, unfunny attempt at an action comedy. It has no notable redeeming qualities. It was bad enough that from this day forward, I’m ending my strategy of purposefully reviewing bad movies in order to make fun of them. As the old saying goes, it’s all fun and games until someone sees One for the Money.
Alleged movie star Katherine Heigl plays Stephanie Plum, a woman who loses her job at Macy’s. Rather than getting a job that won’t involve killing people and fending off murderers and rapists, she decides to get a job that involves killing people and fending off murderers and rapists: She becomes a bounty hunter. And it’s not like she’s some kind of tough woman — she’s inept, a little ditzy and afraid to shoot a gun. She even admits that “keeping it cool” isn’t her “strong suit.” Dragon tattoo? No way.
Plum’s first job is to hunt down an accused murderer named Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara) and bring him in to court in exchange for $50,000. Soon enough, she somehow tracks him down, but he convinces her that he’s innocent (which he is, of course), and the two of them spend the rest of the movie in the dangerous underbelly of Trenton, N.J., trying to uncover the truth about how Morelli was framed. There’s technically chemistry between Plum and Morelli, in the same way that mixing water and dirt in a laboratory is technically chemistry.
The only memorable thing about One for the Money is the ludicrous lack of concern Plum and Morelli show for the harrowing events going on around them. It’s not a stoic fearlessness, either, but an inexplicable carelessness. For example, as some bad guys plant a bomb under Plum’s car, she coincidentally just lends the car to someone else. Unfortunately for that someone else, the car promptly bursts into a fireball outside her apartment when the unlucky fellow turns on the engine. As she and Morelli casually peer at the smoldering ruins of the explosion that was meant for her and killed an innocent man, Morelli says something along the lines of, “Looks like you won’t be using that car any time soon.” Plum rolls her eyes and playfully punches Morelli’s arm. Good times!
In the film’s climactic scene, Plum kills a guy with five gunshots to the heart (after fumbling around in her purse for 30 seconds to find her gun) but not before she gets hit in the thigh with a bullet herself. A battered Morelli yells to her, “You’ve been hit!” to which she responds, “Oh, my god! Ohh, my god! Oh, my god! I just killed a man for the first time in my life, and I’ve been shot and I’m freaking out right now!. I’m going to faint!” No, just kidding. She rolls her eyes and deadpans, “Thanks, Einstein.” So yeah, don’t see One for the Money.
