Local comedian-turned-filmmaker Pierre (one name please – we're now a famous writer, director, producer and movie star) seems like a nice, funny guy. The kind of guy I'd like to sit down and have a few beers with. Unfortunately, he is not the kind of guy I'd like to spend an hour and a half with in a darkened movie theater. Maybe it's not him but his untalented friends, all of whom Pierre seems to have cast in "For Da Love of Money," a half-hearted, only fitfully professional attempt at "Friday"-style zaniness set over the course of one very strange day (okay, it's boring, really) in Los Angeles.
Ostensibly the tale of what happens when Dre's (Pierre) cash-poor neighbors learn that an armored car robber has stashed $20,000 in his backyard, "Money" is really one long, not particularly comic misunderstanding. See, they all think he's got the twenty grand (even though a bum walks off with the loot in the first 10 minutes), whereas he thinks they're after a much more modest insurance check for $2,000 he has just received in the mail. Can you imagine the hilarious possibilities? Neither, apparently could Pierre, who attempts to forgo a real plot for a random string of pointless and only anemically amusing vignettes of him getting yelled at by such colorful characters as the Fat Mailman, the Midget 'Ho and the Mincing Drag Queen. For da love of God, spare me.
FOR DA LOVE OF MONEY (R, 88 minutes) – Contains obscenity, sex and drug humor and a sex scene. At the Hoyts Bowie Cinema 14 and Hoyts Potomac Yard Cinema 16.
