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There are few pleasures in life that come close to seeing a good film. At its best, cinema can elicit profound sentiments, change one’s view of the world, or simply get one through a crappy day. This makes it all the more disheartening when one has the misfortune of enduring a film that not only fails to do any of the above, but goes as far as having the opposite effect. 

Fortunately, there are often warning signs that can steer the astute viewer away from this kind of soul-crushing sludge. Take the aptly named One For The Money, in which the film’s only purpose is stated right there as its very title, for your convenience. It’s a film that borders on fraud, a (not-so) clever transfer of your pocketbook to Lakeshore, Lionsgate, and Katherine Heigl. And with what is the viewer left? An insipid, joyless, numbing experience, the climax of which is the moment the credits roll.  

Strangely enough, One For The Money probably deserves some careful study, for it represents the logical progression of the populist trend in North American cinema. The film is stripped of exposition, leaving a skeletal framework of voiceovers by Heigl to tell us about how down-on-her-luck she is (I’ve picked my metaphors carefully, for Heigl relays these narrations with all the vigour of a corpse). But alas! How awesome would it be if her character found a new job that was completely contrary to her nature as a white, middle-class woman? Like, say, as a bounty hunter? “I was shooting a gun; how hot is that?” she ask-exclaims at one point, but she’s fooling no one. 

The script plays around with the white-girl-can’t-do-badass-things dimension listlessly, like a kid with spinach on his plate, before moving on to the other racial stereotypes that have been so popular in mainstream cinema these days. Look! Latino gangsters and sassy black girls! The way these stereotypes are repeatedly trotted out and affirmed by the film is nauseating.

Of course, the greatest blight in the film is reserved for Heigl herself. Coming off a year full of strong, Byronic female protagonists (Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary in Young Adult; Brit Marling’s Rhoda Williams in Another Earth), Heigl’s Stephanie Plum is a disappointment at best and a disgrace at worst; despite spending so much of the film trying to convince both the characters around her and the audience to take her seriously, she is constantly bailed out by macho-men, one situation after another. When she does get a takedown, she is guilt-ridden instead of celebratory. Apparently, the logic of this film dictates that white girls can’t be badass after all—though Heigl’s character is so easily seduced by the same guy (Jason O’Mara) who took her virginity on a diner floor when she was 16 and never called again. 

Plus, Heigl is simply not very funny. In fact, not much of the film was. There are scenes in which the music could have been lifted right from a porno. Some lines are so bewilderingly awful (“we’re ancient history—like the pyramids, baby!”) that one feels embarrassed for the actor, in what are possibly the only moments of sympathy in the film. The eccentric grandmother trope is now officially dead, as is the trope of the tough guy who cooks to show his sensitive side. What this whole steaming pile of clichés and repulsiveness amounts to is an insult, if not outright attack, on the viewer’s intelligence.  

The best thing about the film is its length. At an hour and forty minutes, the film isn’t long enough to ruin your entire night. Watching movies like One For The Money makes you grateful for the little things like that. Heigl’s newest release represents everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood, and gets nothing right.