Book vs. Movie: One for the Money
By Russ Bickerstaff
February 2, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
One For The Money
Romance novelist Janet Evanovich had hit on the highly commercial idea of mixing contemporary romance with crime suspense genre fiction. It was 1987. It had been roughly half a decade since her first romance novel was published. The romance crime heroine Stephanie Plum debuted in 1994, promptly becoming very, very successful. A commercial novelist had found her heroine and Evanovich made her fortune.
Rather than making her heroine a detective of any kind, Evanovich was inspired by Robert DeNiro’s character in Midnight Run . . . so she became a bounty hunter. Eighteen novels later, the character has a huge following. It’s inevitable that a commercially successful novel series inspired in part by Hollywood action would eventually make its way back to Hollywood. A film adaptation makes its way to theatres. Starring Katherine Heigl, the film is helmed by longtime TV director Julie Anne Robinson.
This is Hollywood’s first interaction with Evanovich. If the movie is anywhere near as successful as the series has been, Evanovich’s work has a future in Hollywood. With a fan base that has supported a very, very long series of novels, Stephanie Plum has a dedicated fan following guaranteed to see the film. How well does the action movie capture the action movie-inspired novel?
The Book
Fully engineered to be fun, commercial fiction, Evanovich’s One For The Money is an exceedingly breezy 320 pages in paperback. It’s a rather delicate blend of different action and romance novel conventions tied together in just the right way to appeal to women… and potentially men at the same time. I don’t know exactly what the demographics on the readership for the Stephanie Plum novels are, but if one were trying to fuse a tough guy’s action story with a soft and squishy romance for the sake of joining the two audiences, you’d come out with something looking more or less exactly like One For The Money.
Being an action story, the novel is designed to follow the lives of extraordinary people, but it’s firmly grounded in day-to-day life that Evanovich is evidently very, very familiar with. The story is set in Trenton, New Jersey. As the story opens, protagonist Stephanie Plum has been fired from her job as a lingerie buyer. She’s desperately trying to keep her head above water financially, so she seeks work from her… um… her cousin, Vinnie (described as looking almost nothing like Joe Pesci at 5’7,” thin and weasel-like.) Vinnie Plum is a bail bondsman who is reluctant to give Stephanie work as a bounty hunter until she threatens him with blackmail. The assignment she gives him turns out to be a sleazy guy she went to school with - a dodgy guy who has turned out to be a big-named hero cop in Trenton - a guy named Joe Morelli.
Stephanie looks forward to bringing Morelli in, but she’s completely unprepared to do so having never really engaged in the types of activities bounty hunters often find themselves getting into. She enlists the help of various people, including a far more experienced bounty hunter who works for Vinnie.
As things progress, we find out that the crime Morelli is due to stand trial for is a bit more complicated than it looks on the surface. There are other parties involved including a champion boxer who likes to terrorize and rape women. In the hunt for Morelli, Plum runs into the boxer. It turns out that Morelli is trying to protect Plum from the boxer and things get complicated from there.
Evanovich does a good job of pacing a novel that never quite has the time to get boring. The author also does a pretty good job of keeping Plum interesting and sympathetic throughout the novel even as she gets in over her head and makes some stupid mistakes here and there. The charm is supposed to be that she’s the direct opposite of the standard action hero, but being an attractive woman who is pegged on a couple of different occasions as being sexually desirable, she’s got the single most important feature of any pop female action hero. As long as your action heroine is attractive, she’s more or less fitting the mold of an action hero. Everything else is just details. As a result, the Evanovich’s focus on Plum’s relative inexperience in what she’s engaging in seems kind of self-conscious and irrelevant. Yes, a good portion of her charm is the fact that she’s in over her head, but it’s hardly new to this type of story.
Even the impoverished nature of the character has a precedent that goes back to the hardboiled gumshoes found in the work of authors like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. As good a novel as is it is, there really isn’t any innovation here on any level. It’s all competently delivered pop fiction that turns out to have become quite successful. So it’s perfect for Hollywood. But how good a job did they do of capturing what made the book so appealing to so many readers?
The Movie
By now the story has already been told and I‘m just delivering the next eulogy - the film was never screened for critics. It ended up getting a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. A movie with a modest $43 million production budget has only had an opening weekend of $13 million. This one’s not going anywhere. Stephanie Plum is not destined to be the next big action hero. So what went wrong?
First of all - the novel itself was patterned so heavily on action movies that to make a film based on it feels a bit like a remake. And at the hands of a particularly uninspired director and an equally uninspired trio of credited screenwriters, it feels like a really weak retread of a Hollywood action film that never made it off the page of the paperback. Quite often it’s the problem that a book doesn’t fit the formula of a Hollywood film so it feels awkward onscreen. This one feels that way onscreen because the book fit the formula WAY too closely. Hollywood producers take note… the Hollywood blockbuster novel has no reason to go to the big screen. It’s already a movie - it just never got produced. Please let us keep novels like Jennifer Government. There’s no use putting it through the motions of doing a remake of a film that’s already been made even if it’s never been produced. (I sincerely hope that sentence made some kind of sense.)
Heigl continues to show some glimmer as a promising young actress nearly 20 years after her big screen debut in a minor, supporting role in the 1992 coming-of-age film That Night. Heigl’s problem as Plum not that she isn’t a talented screen actress. Heigl is actually kind of fun in the role. Her problem here is that she’s playing a character who is so narrowly drawn with her own charm that it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for individual interpretation.
Heigl adopts the Jersey accent as best as possible and goes through the motions, but the character is already so well-rendered in the novel that she’s just aping Plum. Every other actor in a solidly competent ensemble does a pretty good job of copying the feel and tone of the novel in some way, but it the action present in the film seems like a slightly convoluted copy of a copy of a copy.
The actual plot of the story has been dismantled and abbreviated as one might expect, but some of the original, offbeat flavor is lost. This is a slightly sanitized version of what’s going on in the book. And because it feels like a Hollywood version of New Jersey, we never really feel like Heigl’s Plum is ever even in the kind of casual danger the book casts her in. In the book, we know Plum is in over her head and she’s going to make it out of the book fine. In the movie, we know Plum is in over her head and she’s going to make it out fine - and we don’t care. It’s because any personality beyond the big superficial quirks gets bled out in a film that does its best to transfer itself onto the big screen.
The Verdict
One For The Money is a cinematic Hollywood action-inspired novel that carried a lot of its appeal from the novelty of reading an action film. Turning a novel that is an action film into an actual action film was a serious miscalculation on the part of nearly everyone involved. The novel isn’t brilliant, but it’s fun. The movie isn’t brilliant, but it’s not as much fun as the book. Everyone involved can get on with their lives. It was kind of a weird project, but it’s over now. Heigl continues to show promise. Her next movie is about a wedding. The cast includes Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams and Diane Keaton. It’s got to be good, right? Right?