Review: Worth Winning

Mark Harmon plays a smarmy TV weatherman and all-round ladies’ man bachelor. His miserable married buddies (including Mark Blum and former “SNL” nobody and future Mr. Elaine Benes, Brad Hall) make a bet with Harmon. He has to get engaged to three specially chosen women within three months, and videotaped proof is necessary to complete the bet. After which he can simply dump them all like the prick he is. If he wins, Harmon gets Blum’s wife’s Picasso painting (The wife, by the way, is played by a humourless Andrea Martin). The three women are; ditsy Maria Holvoe, bored and married (!) Lesley Ann Warren, and smart, cultured but extremely strong-willed concert pianist Madeleine Stowe who loathes everything Harmon represents. Gee, I wonder which one he’s actually gonna fall for. Whoops, spoil…nah, I can’t even type that with a straight face. Arthur Malet mugs mercilessly in a recurring role as a movie ticket seller, and Kevin Dunn turns up at the end as a bidder at an auction.

 

Directed by Will Mackenzie (A TV veteran, having directed a lot of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Scrubs” episodes), this 1989 apparent ‘romantic comedy’ is completely botched due largely to a smug and thoroughly detestable character played with a surprising lack of charm by Mark Harmon. Also not helping things are the fact that there’s zero laughs here, and characters whose behaviour could only be seen as realistic if they were aliens and the film were set on Uranus. You know there’s gonna be a happy ending here, but under no circumstances whatsoever does this smug bastard deserve anything resembling happiness whatsoever. This plays like an episode of “Frasier”, but without the laughs, and instead of the character of Frasier Crane, a smug jerk weatherman. Mark Harmon has developed into a dependable TV actor on TV’s “NCIS” (which I refuse to watch now that Ziva is gone. I swear the new girl is just Ziva with a blonde wig, though. Anyone else see that?), and made for an interesting Ted Bundy in “The Deliberate Stranger”, but for most of his career, he’s been a bit of a lightweight. You can certainly see why Hollywood wanted to make him a star early on, being that he was a bit Tom Cruise meets Kevin Costner, but the combo never really helped him soar. Aside from the Bundy film, it wasn’t until he went grey that Harmon really came into his own as kind of a stoic, latter day Kevin Costner/Gary Cooper-type. He most certainly does not come into his own here and even George Clooney at his most smug (which is far too often if you ask me) is still preferable to Harmon here. I feel a bit sorry for him though, because right at the outset the film has him do oily to-camera asides, ala “Ferris Bueller” minus the rascally charm. For a high schooler, it comes across as rascally charm, for a guy in his 30s (presumably at least), you want to punch his schmuck face really, really hard.

 

And then the plot kicks in and makes matters worse. It’s kind of a precursor to “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”, except the bet here is that Harmon needs to get engaged to three different women within a certain time frame. The problem is that Harmon and his buddies appear to be way too old to be engaging in such immature frat house (or in this case, snooty golf club) douchebaggery. And since these guys are preppy golf club guys, they’re unappealing dickwads anyway. Harmon may be handsome, but there’s just nothing he can do with this to sell it in any attractive way at all. In “How to Lose a Guy”, Matthew McConaughey managed to successfully navigate a character like the one Harmon plays here, but Harmon can’t, partly because the material is lesser. Mostly it’s just because this guy is a major dick.

 

The film itself isn’t very funny (one or two chuckles maybe), not remotely romantic, nor clever, or even original. It sure is creepy, though. The only bright spot here rather surprisingly to me, comes from Madeleine Stowe, who is really quite good, even if nobody could make that godawful multi-coloured tutu dress thing she wears at one point work. It’s truly hideous. Lesley Ann Warren is well-cast, too, though let’s face it, she’s one of the sure signs of a bad film, talented actress or not. “Colour of Night”, anyone? “Burglar”? “Life Stinks”?

 

A stupid film with an unlikeable leading man played by a likeable, if sometimes bland actor. The screenplay, presumably written on a bunch of dirty napkins, is by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott (who later collaborated on “Runaway Bride”), from a novel by Dan Lewandowski. Yes, the film was written by two women. Wow. I bet those two women are now really big fans of TV’s “The Bachelor”. Just a hunch.

 

Rating: D