Losin’ It

Directed by Curtis Hanson, Losin’ It follows four high school friends (Tom Cruise’s Woody, Jackie Earle Haley’s Dave, John Stockwell’s Spider, and John P. Navin Jr.’s Wendell) as they travel to Tijuana for a night of wild partying – with complications ensuing after the guys reluctantly agree to take along a woman (Shelley Long’s Kathy) hoping to get a quick divorce. It’s a comfortably familiar setup that’s employed to somewhat watchable yet predominantly underwhelming effect by Hanson, as the filmmaker, armed with B.W.L. Norton’s screenplay, delivers a hit-and-miss comedy that does, at the very least, benefit from a smattering of compelling sequences and several charismatic performances – with the latter certainly true of Cruise’s ingratiating work as the group’s most affable figure. (Haley, on the other hand, offers up an egregiously broad turn that is, more often than not, akin to nails on a chalkboard.) There’s little doubt, then, that it’s the episodic bent of the picture’s midsection that ultimately cements its downfall, as Losin’ It stumbles from one broadly-conceived interlude to the next with, generally speaking, little thought towards forward momentum – which, when coupled with a late-in-the-game emphasis on needlessly frenetic action set-pieces, cements the film’s place as an aggressively forgettable example of the ’80s sex-comedy genre.

** out of ****