Losin' It

Losin' it is one of my favorite movies because it is so much fun. Sure Tom Cruise is in it, but the best performance is by Jackie Earle Haley as "Big Dave". Go rent it if you can find it! It's really funny.

Losin' It is a pretty funny roadtrip movie, thanks to the comedic antics of Jackie Earle Haley ('Breaking Away') who plays Dave, an oversexed kid desperate from some action during a weekend in Mexico. He and his buddies, Woody (Tom Cruise) clean cut shy kid, headlong Spider (the gorgeous John Stockwell) and Dave's clever brother Wendell (John P. Navin Jr.), embark on a wild roadtrip to lust after girls and underaged booze in 1965.

Each of the guys has their own experiences with love and mischief. Woody spends most of the time with Kathy (Shelly Long), a flamboyant older woman who hitched a ride with the boys to get a quickie divorce. Spider, the ego, abandons the group and frequently gets in trouble with a corrupt sheriff. Wendell, who came along for lots of black market goodies, spends the weekend trying to save his brother's ass, since Dave's misconception that the town is full of easy women gets him in heavy trouble with the locals.

It's a pretty funny movie that I'm surprised hasn't been given more notoriety among 80s fans. Tom Cruise and John Stockwell played their typical characters, but the stars of this movie, were really Jackie Earle Haley and John Navin. They were perfect.

Losin' It is the film that Tom Cruise got first billing in. On the strength of being more than noticed in Endless Love, Taps, and The Outsiders, Cruise got the lead in this minor teen comedy that made quite a bit of money back in the day.

Cruise, Jackie Earle Haley, and John Stockwell are three high school kids from the Eisenhower years who are looking to have a good time in Tijuana. Unfortunately they can't make the trip without John P. Navin who is Stockwell's brother because Stockwell came up short of cash.

Along the way the three of them pick up Shelley Long who is a young married who runs a convenient store on the way with her husband. Our three heroes just happen on her store when she's having a knockdown drag-out with her husband, culminating in Long walking out on her husband to hitching a ride to Tijuana to get a quickie Mexican divorce.

The rest of the film is about their adventures in Tijuana and their escape from there. I do say escape because Stockwell and Haley get into some serious trouble down there in separate incidents. They manage to get some marines on liberty down there mad at them and they fall into the hands of a crooked Tijuana cop played by Henry Darrow who really likes jamming up young Yanqui snot nose kids.

Cruise has an adventure of a different sort with Shelley Long in her pre-Cheers days. He's the only one who gets some enjoyment from Tijuana.

If there's a moral here, there's two of them. First there's no such thing as Spanish fly and second Tijuana is not a good place if you don't know the ropes.

After this Tom Cruise did Risky Business which cemented him as a teen idol and after that All the Right Moves which proved he was not only a box office draw, but a very capable actor.

As for Losin' It, it's an average teen sex comedy without the presence of Tom Cruise would barely be remembered.

I saw this movie in an entirely appropriate place -- as part of an all-night quadruple feature at a cinema in Northern Ontario, which could have been more accurately described as "Four lousy films for the price of one"! (For the record, the other three films were "Ghoulies", "Missing in Action" and "Ninja III - The Domination").

I would say that Losin' It is probably the best of these four films – not that that's really saying very much. (It was the concluding feature of a very long night of cinematic mediocrity) . It's not an awful film (particularly compared with some of the other components of this multiple feature), and it has the advantage of having been put together by a crew who knew what they were doing. Rather, it's an assembly line teen film of the period, which is given somewhat more polish than usual by the presence of Shelley Long and the up-and-coming Tom Cruise in the cast.

Two years previously in 1981, Porky's established a profitable template for teen films that many producers are still exploiting today. I see Losin' It as a Porky's knock-off, from a similar time and aimed at a similar audience. Essentially, if you were part of that target audience, you would probably have enjoyed it. I was just passing out of the target demographic when I saw this, so perhaps I'm more blasé about it than I might have been if I had seen it a few years earlier. There's a whole genre of teen sex comedy (which tries to tease the audience while dancing around the fact that they can't really show very much) that loses a lot of its impact once you've actually "lost it" yourself.

I thought that this movie was very funny the first time I saw it ten years ago, and I still do today. This is a movie that is in the same genre as Porky's or Revenge of the Nerds. True fact, Tom Cruise said in a Playboy interview that he did this movie because of Jackie Earle Haley. Since Haley had been in Breaking Away, Cruise figured that this movie would be just as good. It didn't quite work out the way he expected, at least not right away. Cruise fan or not, it's worth a look. For me, Jackie pretty much steals every scene he's in. Anytime I watch this movie, I have to laugh at Tom Cruise because he ended up becoming one of the biggest stars in the movie world, and he started out in this. If you REALLY want to see Cruise in another light, check out Endless Love, with Brooke Shields. It's his first movie, and though he's in it for less than a minute, it's worth a look, just like Losin' It. Check it out!