Movie Review - One For the Money

My wife has been a fan of the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich for years. I'm not sure if she's read all of them, but she's certainly kept up on the series and has read aloud a number of passages to me over time. I've never read them myself, but from what I've learned through my wife, these books are adventurous, witty, outrageous fun. When we first saw the trailer, we both laughed a lot and agreed that we'd plan on seeing it. We've both sworn off "R" rated movies, so we were a little worried since we know that the books have plenty of raunchy language and innuendo. We were pleased to see it go for a PG-13 rating.

The movie started out immediately revealing its tone and sense of humor as we receive narration from Stephanie and get to meet her family and learn about her financial situation. In addition to her family, we quickly meet Stephanie's new employer and target. Each of the characters in this film are smart-mouthed, quick-witted and very funny. The interactions and dialogue is great. Even the non-comical characters are hilarious. There are plenty of stereotypes and tropes, but they are just funny to watch.

As for plot, the actual murder-mystery she ends up solving was interesting and had a few minor twists, but overall felt like a fairly normal plot pulled from a crime drama.

Where the real fun of this movie comes is in the plot of Stephanie's character development. The concept (Stephanie Plum is an out of work lingerie salesgirl who becomes a bail bond bounty hunter) is a hard to believe at face value but somehow it worked. Even though she bumbles around and gets in a lot of bad situations, she has a ton of spunk that keeps her pushing on and the supporting characters and situations help clean up the mess around her.

My wife tells me that the movie strayed from the book in a number of ways (toning down a lot of things but also modifying timelines and such) but she felt it was true to the tone and feel of the books and she really loved this adaptation…so much so that she's already seen it a couple of times. Interestingly, another sibling didn't really care for the movie. However, she didn't really like the books to much either.

Personally, I had a lot of fun with this movie. It's not super deep by any stretch, but it's got a lot of quick humor. Admittedly the humor can get raunchy at times and is almost always very, very sarcastic…so if you're not into that style of humor, you probably won't enjoy the film. But if like the idea of a fast talking, smart mouthed Jersey girl rushing in and trying to kick-butt (meanwhile getting into all kinds of trouble), then you should have fun. Knowing that there are ~20+ novels in this series, I'd love to see this movie pick up a sequel or two.


3.5 out of 5 stars

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