Ah, the late ’80s—when yuppie smugness was a romantic virtue, and cocaine was probably pitched as a screenwriting tool. Worth Winning is the kind of film that thinks it’s charming, but it’s really just a 100-minute flex by a guy who deserves to get kicked in the teeth with every punchline he delivers. It’s a rom-com where the “rom” is lifeless and the “com” is locked in the trunk of a Porsche driven by a sociopath with mousse in his hair.
Mark Harmon stars as Taylor Worth—get it? “Worth”?—a TV weatherman with the charm of a well-dressed tapeworm. He smiles like he just got away with embezzling Girl Scout cookie money and spends the entire movie treating women like he’s shopping for used cars. This isn’t a love story. This is a con job, wrapped in pastel sweaters and dipped in misogyny so thick you’d need a crowbar and a priest to scrape it off.
The plot, such as it is, centers around Taylor being dared by his rich, bored buddies to make three different women fall in love with him and agree to marry him—all at the same time. Because nothing says high-stakes comedy like fraudulent marriage proposals. One woman is a cellist (there to prove he’s got culture), one’s a nurse (because Florence Nightingale fantasies were still weirdly alive in ’89), and the third is his best friend’s wife, just to really round out the whole “this guy is trash” arc.
You keep expecting the film to wake up and realize Taylor is a garbage person in a good suit, but nope. It doubles down. It plays his sleaze like he’s some misunderstood romantic hero, when in reality he’s one missing Rolex away from being punched out by a bartender.
The women, played by Maria Holvoe, Lesley Ann Warren, and Madeleine Stowe, deserve better. Not just better men—better films. They each try, bless their hearts, to inject dignity into the proceedings, but it’s like trying to resuscitate a dead fish with a cocktail straw. Warren, especially, shows flickers of comic timing, and Stowe—beautiful, poised, magnetic—could have lit up the screen in a smarter movie. Instead, they’re all reduced to a fantasy league of fiancées, like trading cards for the emotionally stunted.
Mark Harmon, meanwhile, struts through the movie like he’s doing a parody of himself but forgot to tell anyone. He’s smug, shallow, and emotionally vacant—but not in the way that’s interesting. No, this is sitcom-villain shallow. 5 o’clock shadow, Porsche keys, and a jawline that hides the moral bankruptcy beneath. This guy is supposed to be our protagonist, but watching him succeed feels like cheering for food poisoning.
The film tries to play this like a battle of the sexes—he woos, they fall, consequences ensue—but the gender dynamics are so out of whack it feels like it was written by a lonely guy who thinks negging is foreplay. And when the third act rolls around, and all the women start to realize they’ve been duped, the movie has the gall to act like he’s the victim. Like, “Oh no, poor Taylor, he just wanted to prove he could manipulate three women into loving him for sport and didn’t mean for things to get messy.”
Cue the redemption arc, where our emotionally vacant Casanova learns a lesson—sort of—and we’re supposed to believe he’s changed because he stops lying for five minutes and finally proposes to one of them for real. It’s like a con man stealing your wallet, then handing you back the change and asking for applause.
The pacing is flabby, the comedy is limp, and the attempts at sincerity feel like a crocodile apologizing with a bib on. By the time the credits roll, you feel like you’ve been forced to attend a wedding between two narcissists while being seated next to their divorce attorney.
Final Verdict:
Worth Winning is about as romantic as a tax audit and only half as funny. It’s a greasy little film that thinks it’s clever, but plays like the ghost of ’80s excess refusing to die quietly. Watching it now, the whole thing feels like an artifact from an era where being a smug jerk with a fake Rolex and hair gel was the apex of male achievement.
1 out of 5 stars.
One lonely star for Madeleine Stowe, who deserved better than being wooed by a walking cologne commercial. The rest of this thing should be buried under a pile of VHS copies of Mannequin 2 and left to rot with its dignity—if it ever had any.
