Nothing Personal

A couple of weeks back I wrote about John Ritter's first big starring role in the feature Hero At Large. Staying in that train of thought, I went and watched his Three's Company costar Suzanne Somers first, and only, starring role on the big screen, 1980's Nothing Personal. I had somehow missed it over the years and here's my thoughts.

Donald Sutherland stars as Roger Keller, a pot smoking ex hippie who is now a professor. When one of his radical students, the great Michael Wincott in a very early role, tells him about this big company who is clubbing baby seals so they can have the land, Keller tries to put an end to it. When no lawyers will help him with his cause, he turns to a young, inexperienced attorney named Abigail Adams, Somers, to help him fight the good fight. Of course the two fall for one another in the process.

Sutherland is always a reliable actor and Somers does her best trying to shed the dumb blonde persona that she played on Three's Company, but this movie just isn't funny. I hate bashing, pardon the pun since this is a movie about clubbing baby seals, a movie that has good intentions, but it is dull. Even Dabney Coleman, the go to bad guy in 80's comedies, doesn't help matters. It's horribly written and the editing is atrocious. Scenes just jump from one to the next without any real transition. Also, the background noise drowns out a lot of the dialogue. According to Somers, Sutherland took over a lot of the directing duties because director George Bloomfield was in over his head. Bloomfield had directed a lot of Canadian television, mostly SCTV, and if you look closely, a lot of SCTV players, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherity, pop up in small roles.

Maybe having a moral conscience isn't a good mix for comedies, and Nothing Personal is a good example why.

It's not available on dvd and blu ray, but it's streaming on Amazon Prime.