Lights Out Movie Reviews
Copyright (c) 1994, Bruce Diamond
All rights reserved


        Ŀ
          I LOVE TROUBLE:  Charles Shyer, director.  Nancy Meyers  
          & Charles Shyer, screenplay.  Starring Julia Roberts,    
          Nick Nolte, Saul Rubinek, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn,  
          Kelly Rutherford, Olympia Dukakis, Marsha Mason, Eugene  
          Levy, Charles Martin Smith, Dan Butler, Paul Gleason,    
          Jane Adams, Lisa Lu, and Nora Dunn.  Touchstone.         
          Rated PG.                                                
        

          Structured to play like a romantic thriller from the '30s
     and '40s, I LOVE TROUBLE stars Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte as
     rival newspaper reporters in Chicago.  Nolte is Peter Brackett,
     an old-hound columnist who gets assigned to a commuter train
     derailing just because he's the only one available.  Roberts is
     the young hot-shot Sabrina Peterson, eager to make a name for
     herself in the big city.  The beginning stages of their rivalry
     is the most interesting aspect of the story, but after they team
     up to solve the mystery of the crash, the picture heads for a
     head-on collision of its own.

          Pairing Roberts and Nolte should have made for a better
     movie.  Their potential chemistry and natural rivalry (for on
     screen time, if not for the story they're "reporting" on) could
     have made for heady stuff, but Charles Shryer's leaden direction
     and the mickey-mouse script co-written with long-time partner
     Nancy Meyers (mickey-mouse script, Touchstone Pictures, Buena
     Vista distribution, it all adds up to a cheap shot, but what the
     hey) take the focus off the budding relationship and involve us
     in an over-complicated plot that we really don't care about.
     Assigning a columnist and novelist of Brackett's stature to a
     routine train accident is a waste of resources and would result
     in the firing of the paper's editor in any other newspaper-
     centered movie, but Shryer & Meyers stretch their creative
     license just to bring their protagonists together.  Somewhere in
     the mess that becomes Brackett's and Peterson's professional
     rivalry is mired a roll of missing microfilm, predictable bad
     guys that are easy to pick out the first time you see them, a
     bovine growth hormone, and a fictional chemical company located
     in Wisconsin.  Big business is to blame again (see THE PELICAN
     BRIEF, see THE FUGITIVE), blessed with powers to circumvent the
     law whenever they see fit.  Gotta love them conspiracy nuts.

          I LOVE TROUBLE really is a film that doesn't know what it is
     or where to focus.  Boosters would argue that such a criticism
     indicates a multi-layered film (e.g., WOLF, THE CRYING GAME), but
     that contention is not true for the current picture.  The story
     wanders all over the map and throws in a couple of red herrings,
     in a plot that crosses the line from romantic comedy to romantic
     thriller to caper comedy and back again, with no thought given to
     consistency.  I LOVE TROUBLE is aptly titled, and an sad disap-
     pointment.

     RATING:  $
