NOTHING PERSONAL (1980) **

Donald Sutherland stars as a professor who is outraged that baby seals are being bludgeoned with baseball bats by the government who want to install a military base on the seals’ breeding ground in Alaska.  No one wants to take on the big corporation holding the government contract, so he resorts to looking in the phone book for a lawyer.  He winds up choosing Suzanne Somers and together they team up to stick it to the man and save some seals.

Nothing Personal is a weird movie.  I don’t know who the intended audience was.  It seems like an ‘80s updating of a ‘60s counterculture comedy with a dash of ‘70s political thriller, but the subject matter is so specific that it’s hard to generate any laughs.  

What you’re left with is the sight of Somers flirting with Sutherland in between causing a ruckus with corporate execs over the seals.  They aren’t bad together either.  In fact, they’re interesting enough to make you wish they had better material to work with.  (There’s a scene where Sutherland goes on and on about Somers’ pussy that is surprising, considering the PG rating.)

The reason why none of this works was probably because it was never intended to.  It was made as a Canadian tax shelter movie (the accents are a dead giveaways), so the producers could write it off and still come out ahead, even if it was a flop.  The ending is a washout and some scenes feel like they were almost stapled together.  Perhaps there was a longer cut somewhere that got whittled down because so much of it is choppy.  (Obviously looped dialogue like, “Let’s stop back at the hotel and change our clothes” is clumsily added in to prevent obvious continuity errors in between scenes.)  

Director George Bloomfield also did a lot of episodes of SCTV, which explains why Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Joe Flaherty appear in bit parts.