Taglines: She’s looking for a few not-so-good men.
After losing her job, Jersey girl Stephanie Plum is broke. Needing a job she is told that her cousin, a bail bondsman, needs someone to help out in the office. But the only job openings he has are for skip tracers. She learns that Joe Morelli, a guy she knew intimately years ago, is one of the “skips”. She eventually finds him but wasn’t really prepared so he gets away. Another bounty hunter, Ranger, tries to teach her.
Eventually she finds Morelli again, but he claims he is innocent of the crime he is accused of and he is trying to prove his innocence. Eventually Stephanie thinks he’s telling the truth so she stakes out the person who can help him. She only finds herself in trouble and Morelli saves her. She tries to find someone who can prove his innocence, but the problem is that shortly after meeting with them they’re killed or attacked.
One for the Money is a 2012 American crime comedy film based on Janet Evanovich’s 1994 novel of the same name. Directed by Julie Anne Robinson, the screenplay was written by Liz Brixius, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith. It stars Katherine Heigl, Jason O’Mara, Debbie Reynolds, Daniel Sunjata and Sherri Shepherd.
The film debuted at #3 behind The Grey and Underworld: Awakening with $11.5 million on its opening weekend. One for the Money grossed $26,414,527 domestically and $10,479,194 globally to a total of $36,893,721 worldwide, below its $40 million budget. Heigl was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for her performance in the film, but lost the award to Kristen Stewart for both Snow White and the Huntsman and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.
Film Review for One for the Money
Katherine Heigl steps into the shoes of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling bounty hunter, and the results are hardly page-turning.
It took 18 years for a screen version of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling comic thrillers about New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum to hit the screen, and it should take little more than a weekend to erase any chance of it becoming a franchise. Starring a painfully awkward Katherine Heigl, One for the Money mostly resembles a failed television pilot, a feeling which is only reinforced by its late-January release and failure to be screened for critics.
Sporting brown hair, a drab wardrobe and a wobbly Jersey accent as the unemployed former lingerie saleswoman turned “recovery agent,” Heigl tries hard throughout. But she’s undone by the schizophrenic nature of the material, which unsuccessfully wavers from comedy to thriller without scoring on either front.
Director Julie Anne Robinson, working from a screenplay by Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius, seems to be trying for dark humor, as evidenced by such episodes as a character being blown to bits by a car bomb essentially becoming a punch line. It also is telling that the only two senior citizens on display are a geriatric exhibitionist and a dotty grandma (Debbie Reynolds, in a career nadir) who shoots a gun at a turkey dinner.
The cutesy plot revolves around Plum’s first assignment, to capture a possibly corrupt and murderous cop (Jason O’Mara) who also happened to relieve her of her virginity years earlier. The tiresome cat-and-mouse game between the gruff fugitive and his clearly still-enamored pursuer resembles a gender-switching variation of 2010’s The Bounty Hunter, and we all know how well that film turned out.
Strangely, while there’s little romantic chemistry between Heigl and O’Mara, there’s plenty between her and Daniel Sunjata as a mentoring fellow bounty hunter whom Plum describes as “Michelangelo’s David dipped in caramel” and who rescues her on several occasions. Sunjata’s droll underplaying enlivens every scene he’s in, providing a taste of what the film might have been.
Several of the supporting players deliver entertainingly pungent comic turns, including Sherri Shepherd as a gregarious hooker, Fisher Stevens as an ill-fated rival of Plum’s and Patrick Fischler as her bail-bondsman cousin. On the other hand, John Leguizamo, as a sleazy boxing-gym owner, deserves far better material. Although the film’s official running time is listed as 106 minutes, it actually seemed closer to 90. Not that anyone’s going to be complaining.
One for the Money (2012)
Directed by: Julie Anne Robinson
Starring: Katherine Heigl, Jason O’Mara, Daniel Sunjata, John Leguizamo, Sherri Shepherd, Debbie Reynolds, Debra Monk, Nate Mooney, Ana Reeder, Ryan Michelle Bathe, Annie Parisse
Screenplay by: Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray
Production Design by: Franco-Giacomo Carbone
Cinematography by: Jim Whitaker
Film Editing by: Lisa Zeno Churgin
Costume Design by: Michael Dennison
Set Decoration by: Linda Lee Sutton
Art Direction by: Dennis Bradford
Music by: Deborah Lurie
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, sexual references and language, some drug material and partial nudity.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: January 27, 2012
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