Movie: One For the Money

I'm going to keep this as short as possible, because I had high hopes for One For the Money.  And they were dashed to pieces.  I'm so depressed about it that I might not even be able to finish this post.  For me to consider a book well adapted, the film needs to save the essence of the book.  To me, this boils down to character and tone.  Change anything else you like, but if character and tone are there, chances are I'll love the movie for the same reasons I loved the book.

For Stephanie Plum, this means laugh out loud humor and over the top characters.  And I didn't get that.  At all.  The movie was bland and couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a comedy or an action movie.

Stephanie had no personality and Heigl lacked the spark and energy that made Stephanie so likeable in the books.  Ranger became a cuddly side character instead of BATMAN (which is how Stephanie describes him in every book).  Daniel Sunjata did a great job with the character that was written, but that character was not the Ranger that I have grown to love (every bit as much as Morelli).  Debbie Reynolds was great, but her character was a little too sane.  I love the characters in Stephanie Plum's world, because of how ridiculous they are, but in the movie there is nothing special about any of them.

Then there was the humor... or lack of it.  There were jokes and set pieces and a few times where I laughed out loud, but there were also long stretches of time where nothing funny happened.  Then, the film seemed to remember it was supposed to make me laugh and made a joke.  Since the bad guys weren't scary AT ALL, I spent the time where the movie wasn't funny thinking about how the movie wasn't funny.

That's not to say that the movie was bad--it was average.  But it could have been amazing.