terrible

Teaming Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Sommers together in a romantic thriller comedy has gotta be one of the more bizarre pairings i’ve ever seen in a movie. What makes “Nothing Personal” all the more confounding is that you’re constantly trying to figure out what both of them were thinking when they signed on to this abysmal trainwreck.


Sutherland plays a college professor who heads to Washington to save an endangered species of seal only to find that the only lawyer willing to help him fight the big corporation doing the killing is a very green, Harvard-educated woman (Sommers) anxious to prove herself in court. That he’s surprised she’s a woman upon their first meeting is supposed to signal the women’s lib comedy to come but this is a movie no gender should want to claim as their own, especially women.


The dialogue in this goes downhill fast to the point where in their second scene together they’re already having uncomfortable conversation about her panties and what makes her horny. Robert Kaufman’s screenplay makes more than unsubtle hints that he wants it to be a sexual romp but he dives into it so quickly that everything just feels crude and forced. And not to mention the film is PG so bad dialogue and Sommers trying to kiss Sutherland is about all we get. But even in that, the scene comes across like kissing a corpse so one cringes harder imagining what their sex scenes would be like.


With his stodgy, hangdog sincerity, Sutherland appears to have been told to look as stiff and uncomfortable as he can in every scene. We can tell right off the bat the comedy is not supposed to come from him but with Sommers, making her film debut here. And she’s bubbly but purely empty. Saddled with terrible sitcom lines that seem to require a laugh track, she doesn’t so much give a performance but do a variety of poses and smiles that do very little but highlight her teeth and her assets. By not understanding whether she’s a scrappy attorney or a sexpot who crassly uses her body to get what she needs, the screenplay does her no favors but even so, Sommers still shows no warmth, intelligence, or identifiable quality and even her line reading lacks any semblance of wit.


That’s most surprising because she at least seemed more effervescently charming on “Three’s Company” but here she seems at a loss of how to play it, and as a whole, this may have derailed a bigger film career. But cinema’s loss is the thighmaster’s gain I suppose.