Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #157 Nothing to Lose (1997)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Travolta/Cage, The Travolta/Cage Project and my journey through the motion pictures of Rebecca Gayheart have all reached the magical year of 1997. There are certain years that stand out in your mind as golden ones when the world radiated boundless promise and it just plain felt good to be alive.
1984 is one of those years for me. I was eight years old. My world switched from black and white to Technicolor when I discovered Michael Jackson, MTV, Dr. Demento and “Weird Al” Yankovic.
1994 was another seminal year. I turned eighteen, graduated from high school, started college and fell in love with the entirety of music and film. It was the year of Pulp Fiction and Nas’ Illmatic, Chungking Express and Park Life.
In 1997 I was twenty-one. I had just started writing for The A.V Club. The Onion was exploding in popularity. I had sweet-ass financial aid and a generous scholarship that made me want to never graduate from college.
It was a kinder, more hopeful, more optimistic time, a time I could not be more nostalgic for. So when I looked up 1997’s Nothing To Lose on Wikipedia I once again fell into the awful trap of experiencing hope for something I knew damn well fucking sucked.
Or did it? Oh sure, the twenty-one year old me was not overly enamored of Nothing But Trouble but my forty-four year old self wondered how anyone could possibly dislike a 1997 Hollywood movie with a banging soundtrack of hip hop and R&B hits including Li’l Kim featuring Left Eye, Da Brat, Missy Elliott and Angie Martinez’s “Not Tonight (Ladies Night Remix)”, Coolio’s “C U When U Get There” and Tony! Toni! Toné!’s “If I Had No Loot?”
How could a movie from the most magical year in human history with a supporting cast that includes John C. McGinley, Giancarlo Esposito, Michael McKean, Kelly Preston, Rebecca Gayheart, Irma P. Hall and writer-director Steve Oedekerk in a flashy cameo be an out and out stinker?
Oh, foul hope! You lead to nothing but crushing disappointment! Time may have enshrouded Nothing to Lose in a hazy, pleasantly disorienting cloud of nostalgia but it has not made it any better.
True, I did get a cheap buzz from the soundtrack but what didn’t work then continues to not work now, most notably Martin Lawrence’s insufferable performance as Terrance Paul "T. Paul" Davidson, a loudmouth armed robber with a heart of gold who joins forces with a suicidal white ad executive after they meet cute when the desperate small time criminal robs him at gunpoint.
Tim Robbins stars as Nick Beam, a yuppie head over heels in love with his wife Anne (Kelly Preston). The late Preston wasn’t just beautiful; she was goddamn radiant. She glowed with an inner spark, a luminescence.
As Nothing To Lose opens Nick and his wife have been married for a while but they remain as flirtatious as the day they first met. It’s rare to see married couples that don’t just love each other but are rapturously in love with each other, as Nick and Anne are here.
Unfortunately Preston more or less disappears from the movie about twelve minutes in when Nick comes home to what he thinks is his wife having sex with his sleazy boss Philip "P.B" Barrow (Michael McKean).
Nick is so despondent over the idea that his soulmate is cheating on him with his boss that he almost instantly loses his will to live, then just as quickly becomes a master criminal after desperate thief T (Lawrence) unsuccessfully attempts to robs him at gunpoint.
The suicidal Nick, who truly has nothing to lose, instead drives all the way to Arizona with T, who turns out to be very bad at armed robbery and crime in general. The mismatched duo engages in a series of sorry slapstick scuffles as they jockey for position and supremacy before Nick decides to get revenge on his womanizing boss for stealing his wife by robbing a safe where he keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars with T’s assistance.
Back in Los Angeles the bumbling, battling duo stay at the home of T's family in a sequence designed to make Nick and the audience feel bad for thinking T is not a great guy just because he held Nick up at gunpoint and drops the B word with a flagrance that would embarrass Too $hort.
In the scene’s most ridiculous moment, Nick gazes admiringly at a stack of employment rejection notices T has been helpfully collecting in a file. I suppose he could be saving them as proof that he’s seeking work if filing for unemployment but within the context of the film it feels like he’s collecting evidence that he is an upstanding citizen and consummate mensch in case a judgmental white man happened to be going through his belongings.
If these dudes were the stars, it’d be a much better film.
The idea is to humanize T. Instead it feels like the movie is condescendingly establishing that T is, in fact, NOT the kind of black man white audiences at the time might look down on as stereotypical—a profane, misogynistic small time criminal—but rather a black man worthy of respect because he has a loving family, an education, a skillset and an earnest desire to work.
At best the big reveal that actually T isn’t the incorrigible sleaze bag he’s been acting like all film long, that he’s one of the “good ones” feels condescending. At worst it’s racist.
Nick and T have more to worry about than infidelity and law enforcement. In Arizona they run afoul of a competing team of inter-racial armed robbers played by the always wonderful John C. McGinley and Giancarlo Esposito.
Esposito is a little like Matthew Broderick in that his most legendary, iconic and best known role, indeed his career-defining role, is not just different from the kind of performance he usually delivers but rather its antithesis.
Broderick became famous for playing Ferris Bueller, glib, cocky jackass, then spent the ensuing decades playing doughy sad sacks, most notably in Election. On a similar note, Esposito capped off an incredible career playing Gus Fring on first Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul.
Esposito brought a terrifying inner calm to his Machiavellian drug kingpin but many of his performances leading up to it were like his role as Charlie Dunt here. Esposito brings a live-wire energy and irreverent humor to his lollipop-sucking lowlife criminal that enlivens every scene he’s in and made me wish Nothing to Lose was a Tim Robbins/Giancarlo Esposito movie and not primarily a vehicle for the raunchy, exhausting comic stylings of Martin Lawrence. Esposito is having a fucking blast here and his joy is infectious.
Back in Los Angeles a drunk, distraught Nick ends up at a bar where a gorgeous barista played by Gayheart throws herself at him sexually but Nick is too hung up on his wife’s ostensible infidelity to submit to the much younger woman’s feverish sexual advances.
Fortunately for our seemingly luckless protagonist, Nick’s wife wasn’t cheating on him after all. It all turns out to be a simple misunderstanding and Nick, who is an even better, even more moral paragon of human decency than T, decides to give back all the money they stole because apparently stealing from someone who didn’t have sex with your wife is morally wrong.
Nothing to Lose is very dumb and very loud, a slapstick live-action cartoon full of indifferently choreographed fisticuffs and even more lazily realized car chases. It could not be more 1997 but nostalgia only takes it so far.
In Nothing to Lose our hero is sexually pursued by characters played by two of the most beautiful women in the world in Preston and Gayheart. Of course Preston was more than just beautiful. She was a gifted comedienne with extraordinary presence who conveyed great warmth as well as glamour and sexiness.
The same does not seem to be true of Gayheart, alas. Gayheart is a world class beauty but in the films that I have seen for this column she doesn’t necessarily seem to be anything more.
Big studio films like this and Scream 2 consequently had nothing to lose by casting Gayheart in small supporting roles as a ridiculously gorgeous young woman. Unfortunately they didn’t really have a whole lot to gain from her presence either.
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