There’s a scene early in Where the Money Is where Paul Newman, playing a paralyzed ex-bank robber named Henry, gets wheeled around by a bored nurse played by Linda Fiorentino. It’s supposed to feel like slow-burn intrigue—cat and mouse with smirks and sexual tension. What it actually feels like is waiting in line at the DMV while someone tells you how cool the ’60s were.
The premise sounds decent enough in a bar after two beers: a legendary bank robber fakes a stroke to hide out in a nursing home, only to get caught faking it by a disillusioned ex-prom queen now married to a human wallpaper sample (Dermot Mulroney). She blackmails the old man into doing one last job. You’re thinking: heist movie with swagger. Bonnie and Clyde: Assisted Living Edition. Right?
Wrong. Where the Money Is is so slow, so uninspired, you’d swear the reels were weighed down by oatmeal. The “heist” is less “Ocean’s Eleven” and more “Matlock Presents: Mildly Illegal Shenanigans.” It’s a movie about crime that’s terrified of breaking the law—or even speeding slightly in a residential zone.
Paul Newman does his best, and let’s be honest, the man could sell sand in a desert. He brings a little of that old-school twinkle-in-the-eye, but it’s buried under a script that keeps handing him limp, recycled dialogue and expecting it to sparkle. It doesn’t. It sounds like a senior center version of a Tarantino script run through a potato masher.
And then there’s Linda Fiorentino. Oh, Linda. Once the queen of sardonic cool (The Last Seduction, anyone?), she’s stuck here playing a character who’s supposed to be smart, sexy, and cunning—but ends up coming across like she took a wrong turn trying to find a better film. Her character, Carol, is all sass and no plan, like a raccoon in lipstick. One minute she’s fantasizing about robbing banks, the next she’s back to folding laundry with that dead-eyed look that says, I once worked with Scorsese’s cousin’s neighbor, what happened to my life?
Carol’s motivation is basically: “My husband is boring, and I peaked in high school.” Which, honestly, could describe half of America, but most of those people don’t rope an 80-year-old into armed robbery to fix it. Mulroney, for his part, plays the husband with the personality of a toast rack. You almost feel bad for him, until you realize he’s just part of the general atmosphere of cinematic Ambien this movie radiates.
The film limps along with the urgency of a Sunday crossword. There’s no real tension, no stakes, no adrenaline—just a string of scenes where people look at each other like they’re trying to decide if they left the oven on. When the actual heist comes, it’s so low-energy it could’ve been sponsored by the AARP. It’s like watching a bingo game that gets slightly out of hand.
And the ending? Don’t even get me started. It’s supposed to be clever and ambiguous, with a wink. Instead, it’s like a soggy sandwich—squishy, disappointing, and somehow both bland and slightly sour. You sit through 90 minutes expecting at least a little payoff, and instead, you get a shrug disguised as a finale.
Final Verdict:
Where the Money Is should’ve been a lean, witty crime flick with charm and bite. Instead, it’s a meandering nap of a movie with a half-asleep script, wasted talent, and the pacing of a snail on muscle relaxants. It’s the cinematic equivalent of finding a dollar bill in the laundry: momentarily interesting, but not worth the effort.
1.5 out of 5 stars.
One star for Paul Newman still managing to look cooler than anyone else in the room, even while pretending to be catatonic. Half a star because Linda Fiorentino deserves hazard pay for having to pretend this thing had a pulse. The rest? Let’s just say the only real crime here was making this movie.
