Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts aren't exactly the pair you think of for a
romantic-comedy-thriller that wants to be a mix of The Front Page, The Thin Man and Die Hard. (For that matter, those films aren't what you'd think of in terms of a mix.) The whole concept of I Love Trouble, Nolte and Roberts' new film, is pure gibberish, and it takes a rollercoaster ride through every cliche imaginable.
Amazingly, it still comes up a winner.
Admittedly, the makers of I Love Trouble seem to be convinced that all hard-hitting newspaper reporters wear expensive designer clothes as they poke around disaster sites and grill witnesses. (In truth, nobody wears high heels to major train derailments anymore. Local reporters wear them only to murder scenes.)
I Love Trouble moves at a surreal, lighting-fast pace that wears almost as well as the expensive trench coats sported by Nolte. (If this review is starting to sound as if it's about wardrobes, that will give you some idea of how fashion-starved some newspaper people really are.)
Nolte plays Peter Brackett, an investigative reporter-turned-columnist for the Chicago Chronicle (read: Tribune). He's so busy promoting his first novel that he doesn't have time to do his work, and is caught trying to recycle an old piece from '85. His brash laziness so impresses his editor, that he sticks Nolte with covering a train wreck. The assignment is cut-and-dried, until Nolte discovers that there's a new scribbler in town who's capable of out-scooping him.
That's Julia Roberts, the hot new talent working for the rival Chicago Globe (read: Sun-Times). The two quickly find that they have aggressive instincts and a total loathing for each other in common. Nolte is a suave, but chauvinistic, newsman who would lie to a woman before he would his bookie. Roberts plays an abrasive macho femme who's accustomed to matching the boys shot for shot. (She also has an uncanny ability to uncover clues in the bottom of bird cages. Nolte's style is more traditional — he rifles through the trash.)
The train wreck story that brought them together turns into a crazed race between the two of them, as they each build a case of drunken negligence by a railroad employee. But the Exxon Valdez takes a sudden turn toward Watergate as it becomes obvious that something more is going on. (After all, stewed railroad workers don't normally hire South American hitmen to take shots at you.)
The plot in I Love Trouble is a decent one, but what really works are the performances by Nolte and Roberts. On paper, their pairing sounds like a bad plate of raw beef and runny ice cream, but the fact that they click so well is a tribute to the routinely underestimated talents of Nolte and the developing skills of Roberts. It's as if they've met onscreen at the exact right moment in each of their careers.
Nolte has traded in his bleary-eyed look for a sleeker self, and displays a sense of comedic timing that his previous roles rarely hinted at. Likewise, Roberts shows a hard-edged spark that successfully breaks from her soft and vulnerable screen past. They're not exactly Tracy and Hepburn, but they're not bad, either.
Though I Love Trouble has a weak habit of parading its thugs as if it were a B flick, it also has the good grace to give the audience a good time by providing some genuine thrills and two engaging characters.
As for the designer clothes, well, we all wear them at this paper.
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