This Looks Terrible! What's the Worst That Could Happen? (2001)

In the astonishingly dreadful 2001 flop What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, a wildly miscast Martin Lawrence plays a brilliant, glamorous and savvy thief named Kevin Caffery. 

But fans of the late pulp novelist and screenwriter Donald Westlake, whose scripts include The Stepfather and The Grifters, know the character Lawrence plays in What’s the Worst That Could Happen? by a different name: John Dortmunder. And they know him well because the character of John Dortmunder has been the subject of 14 novels, eleven short stories and seven movies filmed over a period decades on multiple continents. 

Westlake’s 1974 novel Jimmy the Kid alone was adapted for American audiences as a Gary Coleman vehicle of the same name with Paul Le Mat playing Dortmunder in 1981 as well as the 1976 Italian movie  Come ti rapisco il pupo with Teo Teocoli as the Dortmunder figure and finally a 1998 German film with Herbert Knaup as Dortmunder. 

Over the course of nearly a half century onscreen Dortmunder has also been played by Robert Redford (1972’s The Hot Rock), George C. Scott (1974’s Band Shot) and finally Christopher Lambert in the semi-obscure 1990 heist comedy Who Me? I cannot say for certain, having not seen many, or possibly even any of these Westlake adaptations, but I am going to guess that no actor has ever been as spectacularly wrong for the role as Lawrence is here. 

One of my favorite movies of last year was The Beach Bum. One of my favorite performances was Martin Lawrence as dolphin tour guide Captain Wack. Lawrence’s revelatory turn as Captain Wack served as a reminder how much fun the actor and comedian can be in the right role. And the right role is always a weird, interesting character turn like his work in House Party, Do the Right Thing and The Beach Bum rather than action hero and leading man roles like this. 

What’s the Worst That Could Happen makes the mistake of casting the charmless and smug Lawrence as a romantic leading man. In a movie that overdoses on wackiness, whose every punchline could easily be accompanied by a slide whistle and skipped record needle sound effect, the romance between Lawrence’s Kevin Caffery and his gorgeous girlfriend Amber Belhaven (Carmen Ejogo) is played punishingly and perversely straight. 

#Greatmomentsinphotoshop

It’s as if director Sam Weisman and screenwriter Matthew Chapman don’t want any jokes, no matter how terrible or ineptly executed, to distract audiences from the powerful lack of chemistry between Lawrence and Ejogo. 

Ejogo is really more of a plot point than a human being; her role is to give Kevin Caffery the ring that will serve as the film’s MacGuffin when, in the script’s sole bit of inspiration, Lawrence’s lifelong criminal has it stolen by Max Fairbanks (Danny DeVito), the shady, unethical, oversexed businessman whose house Kevin had recently robbed. 

In a rich and riotous reversal, the robbed becomes the robber and the robber becomes the robbed. DeVito is lazily but fruitfully typecast as yet another scheming, conniving rat bastard you can’t help but kind of love in spite of his abundant, ebullient, unapologetic awfulness because he’s so full of that trademark DeVito rascally charm. 

Those glasses:"=scamp, that cigar=rascal

DeVito has played more than his share of millionaires, almost invariably of the shady and/or criminal variety. In a society and film world that teaches us that short men should be humble and self-effacing just to avoid ridicule and get by DeVito plays egotists who aren’t just confident but fucking cocky and cocky about fucking.

Part of that cockiness is brazenly sexual in nature: in a film culture that frequently depicts short men as asexual and inferior DeVito’s tiny kings are straight up fuck beasts who do not need to top five feet to have beautiful women of all generations competing for them sexually. 

In What’s the Worst That Could Happen Max is married to a woman played by Nora Dunn but that’s only the beginning of his options. His old assistant Gloria (poor Glenne Headley) seems to be staying alive mostly on the off chance that Max will re-enter her life and want to resume a sexual and romantic as well as professional relationship. 

Gloria seems to live forever in the memory of when Max was shtupping her in addition to being her boss. Then there Tracey Kimberly (Sascha Knopf), a dim-witted sexpot who keeps Max in her life and in her bed against her better judgment because he’s swindled her into thinking he can get her an audition to be a vacuous talking head on Entertainment Tonight. 

DeVito looks an expensively dressed troll here but he nevertheless radiates power and reckless self-assurance, in no small part because the real-life DeVito, whose irresistible essence informs his film and TV persona, is a real-life power broker whose production credits include Reno 911!, How High, Erin Brockovich and a little movie that defined a generation called, I dunno, fucking Reality Bites. And another film that defined a generation as well, Pulp Fiction. 

DeVito has fun no matter how dire the project. Here, DeVito takes great glee in unapologetic villainy. He’s having such a blast playing another brazen degenerate that it seems a terrible shame that the movie doesn’t find anything interesting for him to do other than get on the ostensible hero’s bad side forever by stealing that stupid ring just to be a bastard. 

Lawrence is a low-key embarrassment as a suave crook who is catnip to beautiful women and operates by his own moral code. He’s actively humiliating in the movie’s most ostensibly Lawrence-friendly scenes, which find him and John Leguizamo masquerading as “Arabs” by badly stringing together poorly improvised nonsense while wearing Halloween shop-level approximation of chic sheikh attire. 

Winding Lawrence and Leguizamo up and then letting them riff proves the worst possible strategy. The veteran comic performers bring out the worst in each other. In place of inspiration What’s the Worst That Could Happen? substitutes frenzied exertion. 

This is an extraordinarily busy movie but the frenzied conspiring and strained wackiness does nothing to mask the emptiness at its core. This is truly much ado about nothing, or rather a stupid fucking ring you’ll want to hurl into the sun for making this movie happen. 

Among an overqualified and under-achieving cast William Fichtner stands out, and not in a good way, as Det. Alex Tardio, a little dog-loving foppish dandy who is what the movie imagines is a CRAZY contradiction: a detective who is also a homosexual. The film’s depiction of homosexuality as incredibly exotic and an endless source of hilarity, no jokes required, feels so retrograde that I assumed that the filmmakers had adapted one of Westlake’s earliest John Dortmunder adaptations. 

Nope. The novel that inspired this flop was published in 1996, a mere half-decade before the film. It just feels like the product of an earlier, tackier and more embarrassing age. 

The first time I watched What’s the Worst That Could Happen? it was because I like light, Elmore Leonardesque crime comedies and because I wanted to see just how fucking awful it could possibly be. You know what? It’s pretty fucking awful! In an even more masochistic move, I decided to RE-watch it, rather than any of DeVito’s other movies, so that I could determine, once and for all, whether it could possibly have been as abysmal as I remembered. It was. 

The filmmakers tempted fate with the title What’s the Worst Could Happen?, which invites the answer, “This dreadful movie, obviously.” 

The only element of What’s The Worst that Can Happened that did not disappoint, and that includes such usually dependable ringers as Bernie Mac and Larry Miller, both of whom are off their game here, is its most dated: the retro-meets contemporary soundtrack, which includes collaborations of sorts between dead coroners Marvin Gaye and Frank Sinatra and Erick Sermon and Craig Mack on “Music” and “Wooden Horse” respectively.

If What’s the Worst That Could Happen had kept that Sinatra-meets-Craig Mack energy going all film long, it made have had something. Instead this is a half-forgotten stinkeroo that deserves to be completely, mercifully forgotten.

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