What's The Worst That Could Happen?
Reviewed by David Kashimba

 Danny De Vito and Martin Lawrence are two very different kinds of thieves in the comedy, What’s The Worst That Could Happen? De Vito plays billionaire Max Fairbanks who spent a lifetime bribing and stealing his way into more money and power. Lawrence breaks into rich people’s houses and steals whatever is easy to fence.

This movie is basically a film length television sitcom. People that like situation comedies and are fans of Lawrence or De Vito might find this film entertaining, but for me, the answer to the title “what’s the worst that could happen?” was that I had to sit through this waste of good acting talent. This film is nothing like Lawrence’s Nothing to Lose or De Vito’s Renaissance Man. Both of these films were comedies with good human-interest stories backing them up. What’s The Worst That Could Happen? is simply a series of one-liners that are sometimes funny and sometimes not, but there is no story or depth of character that is necessary to sustain an audience’s interest.

Based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake, the story is supposed to stretch absurdity to a comic tightrope as War of the Roses did. But War of the Roses worked because it stretched the reality of divorce to the absurd and it did it with believable characters that everyone can relate to.

This film has no real foundation. It starts with an already stretched absurdity, and the further it stretches it, the more unraveled the whole story becomes, reducing it to a cast of stereotyped characters with one-liners going nowhere.

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