Lost & Found (1999)

By Greg
Score: 3/10
Let's meet Dylan Ramsey (David Spade), no relation to Gordon Ramsey (famed chef from Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares), a failing restaurateur in need of another bank loan to expand his business. His social life is dim because he isn't the ladies man, although I feel the viewer is led to believe he is. This leads the story to new neighbor and cellist, Lila Dubois (Sophie Marceau) and Dylan feel compelled to meet her. Noticing her deep attachment to her dog, Jack, he decides to kidnap it in order to reap the rewards. Its only for a few days. No harm, no foul. I will return the dog unharmed, heck I will even pretend to search for the dog. Yup, only David Spade.

Problems arise: first, the dog consumes his friend's engagement ring and second, Lila's ex-boyfriend Rene (Patrick Bruel) shows up to help and get Lila back. The Rene character is more likable than the Dylan character, in the Rene scenes its hard to not root for Rene.
 So now Dylan must keep the dog hidden, try to retrieve the ring from its feces, old joke and poorly executed in this film. Dylan enlists his dim witted, hefty employee Wally (Artie Lange) to aid in getting the ring back and keeping the dog away from Lila and Rene.

All the while, Dylan forms a romance with Lila as Rene starts to sniff things out. It all climaxes to a huge dinner where Dylan needs to impress the bank's head lending officer (Martin Sheen), get the ring to his friend so he can propose to girlfriend and obtain an interview with the L.A. Philharmonic for Lila. It does all come together, only in a moment a sheer admittance to all his evil doings does Lila finds out that he kidnapped Jack. Ahhh... poor Dylan. But, it is a romance-comedy all is forgiven and Spade get Marceau, he did co-write the film, of course he'll get the tall French attractive woman.

The film loses all appeal with David Spade; good old sneaky, sleazy, slimy Spade character he made famous from his SNL days. This film came a few years after the loss of Chris Farley and seeing Spade on the big screen only brings back his better buddy films. An obvious attempt at widening his acting range, Spade couldn't handle the lead by himself. At the time of this films release, Spade was on the sitcom "Just Shoot Me." The character on that show had the same sleaze as the Dylan character, only to enhance his character of womanizer sleaze for the current "Rules of Engagement." Plus another noticeable trend, lead women going bra-less. Its not a bad thing, just a 90's trend I recently noticed. With Jennifer Aniston, Rachel character from Friends reviving a similar trend to the "jiggle vision" days of "Charlie's Angels."

Starring: David Spade, Sophie Marceau,Patrick Bruel and Artie Lange
Directed By: Jeff Pollack
Budget/Gross:  $13,000,000 (estimated)/$6,545,360 (USA)
IMDB Rating: 4.7/10
Tomatometer: 13% critics / 30% audiences liked it