Sophie Marceau in Lost & Found (1999)

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Anyone out there buy David Spade as a romantic lead? Anyone? OK, good. Let's move on. Yes, he can be quite funny on occasion and his nasty sarcastic wit is usually good for a few laughs. It's just too bad we have to sit through such cookie-cutter crap for a few clever scenes. Lost and Found is about as limp as comedies come.

There's a character in this inane poop that is very fat, very loud and blond. He follows David Spade around like a brain-damaged puppy and bumps into things. But it's not (the late) Chris Farley. It's some anonymous big slob. Jeez, was Farley's corpse even cold when they decided that this guy was the best new sidekick for David Spade's next movie? Not ONE person said, "Hey, this is pretty creepy. Can we at least make him a dark-haired fat imbecile?" None of it matters, because this fat guy (unlike Mr. Farley) isn't even remotely funny.

The basic plot of Lost and Found makes Three's Company look like Othello. Spade steals a beautiful girl's dog so he can help her look for it. She will ultimately fall for him, regardless of the fact that he's rude, scrawny and basically unpleasant and unattractive in every possible way. Of course, we have a handsome French rival for our smarmy hero to belittle. We are treated to several familiar subplots which all culminate in the "big, expensive and fancy dinner" where all the character's fates will be decided within 30 seconds. (I was wistfully reminded of Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead; always the sign of good filmmaking.)

The gags with the dog simply don't work. It's obvious the writers of this one saw There's Something about Mary three times too often and figured it would be cool to rip the jokes off with the subtlety of a wet 10 decibels fart. The end credits show the worst form of plagiarism as the whole cast comes together for a big lip-sync finale to Deeee-Lite's Groove is in the Heart (just like in ‘Mary’, only with a different song so it seems…new.) Even such a funky song cannot disguise how devoid of originality all of this is. There's also a pretty disgusting recurring gag about a young kid who ‘cries wolf’ about being sexually molested by strangers. Hey, I'm not saying it couldn't be funny. I'm just saying it's pretty unfunny and downright gross in this movie.

Sophie Marceau is a pretty French girl who will one day be able to make up a lie on the spot so that she won’t have tell her grandchildren that she kissed David Spade in a movie. That's her 15 minutes with the SNL loving American audience. There's simply nothing in this short, annoying movie that makes you ever believe anything at all. Characters simply wander about, occasionally having scenes together, most of them with that annoying bastard of a dog. One of the most uneventful movies you'll ever see. Even Spade lip-synching to Neil Diamond is unfunny. (Sounds funny, doesn't it? It's not. I felt bad for the scrawny little guy.)

Whatever it takes to get from point A (no girl) to point B (guy gets girl) is acceptable as a screenplay today, I guess. This movie has no audience at all, really. David Spade fans won't like it because he's pretty tame. Romantic comedy fans won't like it because it displays neither romance nor comedy. It's funny how these things happen all the time, though.

Nudity Report: The true beauty, Marceau shows up in a few loose-fitting T-shirts and leg-amplifying short-shorts, though the skin on display here is most certainly of the PG variety.

IMDB Summary: 1,003 IMDb users rate this one at 5.1/10.

Box Office: Grossed $6.5 million against a budget of $13 million. Yikes.

DVD Info: Fullscreen and Widescreen formats, theatrical trailers, production notes.


Written by: Scott Weinberg