Hey folks, Harry here with Pyul MacTackle's look at THE BIG BOUNCE. I hate the look of the film and I completely don't buy Owen Wilson as a lead character in an Elmore Leonard story. Oh well, they can't all be great, can they? Here's Pyul...
Hey Harry,
There are occasions in life when a film succeeds only at existing, perfectly straddling the border between the good and the bad to a degree that you can't really say either way where it belongs.To digest it almost requires a basic understanding of Zen; to be able to say "This is one of those movies that happens while you watch it" and know that this is about as good a description as any. The Big Bounce is such a film, poised eagerly to become the most easily forgettable film of the new year.
Now this movie can be viewed two different ways: What it should be and what it is. It's easy to argue that 'what it should be' is a much greater film than 'what it is', but for 'what it is' they put it together with such panache that you just can't hate it without tapping into a level of hatred that springs from knowing that someone fucked with an Elmore Leonard novel. So you can hate it on principle, but not for being bad. Because it's really not.
The first misstep here was with casting, primarily Owen Wilson. Casting Owen Wilson as the lead in an Elmore Leonard adaptation is kind of like, well, imagine Quentin Tarantino having cast Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller as Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. All of a sudden, with those casting choices, Pulp Fiction would be an entirely different film. Just imagine the scene in the car discussing the differences between Europe and America. Imagine the stickup at the diner. Imagine them blowing off the kids head in the backseat. Let that roll around for a minute. THAT is exactly what casting Owen Wilson in an Elmore Leonard adaptation does. The movie ceases to be a gritty, cool story about low rent criminals and instead becomes a comedy about a crime that turns into a comical misunderstanding, kind of like what would have happened had Elmore Leonard been asked to pen an episode of Three's Company.
The film opens with a typical noir voice over enforcing one cinematic truth above all: Owen Wilson should NEVER EVER be allowed to do voice overs. The resulting monologue sounds more like someone doing a bad impression of 60 Minutes Andy Rooney reading a crime novel...without beginning "Did you ever notice." "So there I was walking down the road of life with my two friends Bad Luck and Bad Choices." The pinched, nasal delivery is enough to make you want to chuck your full tub of popcorn at the screen. Luckily, someone realized early on that this was the case and this is the last you hear of the disembodied whining.
But the ensuing film is EXACTLY what you'd expect from a movie starring Owen Wilson. It's funny. Owen Wilson excels at making things funny that by all rights really shouldn't be. Lines like "You can't call someone a cocoanut-nigger. Not in this day and age," come off positively hilarious. Then by backing him up with a cast that KNOWS how to be funny in the roles for which they are best suited, well this film entertains constantly. Morgan Freeman as the wise, aging beach rat of a local judge (Complete with Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton in small roles as his best friends); Charlie Sheen as the weaselly, clueless prick; Gary Sinise as the rotten real estate developer; and a small role (not worthy of the poster, but whatever) by Vinnie Jones as the asshole British foreman. Everyone nails their roles and turn in truly funny performances. And as a comedy, this thing works.
Then we have our femme fatale: Sara Foster in her feature film debut. Dear GOD, this woman nailed it. There isn't a moment that she's onscreen that she doesn't demand the attention of every man in the theatre. She's a knockout and to top it off, her cute, bubbly performance of the beach girl who's a whole mess of trouble only amplifies the attraction. There's no question why every man on the island has eyes for her, especially with the way she leads the cast, and the male audience, around by their pricks.
But while at times really funny, the jokes aren't really terribly memorable (my buddies and I tried to recount our favorites and managed, collectively, to remember two) and the movie meanders from joke to joke, slowly setting up a really poorly planned heist, that, by the end of the movie, turns into something different. Completely different.
And this is where the movie really begins to baffle and lose the audience. This movie never really goes anywhere, but rather, just kind of ends up there. The ending of this movie is like Denny's. No one really says "Hey, let's go to Denny's for dinner." No, you drive around until someone says "Fuck it, let's go to Denny's" and you end up there. That's the ending to The Big Bounce. There's no real set up for it and while it's different than you expect, it doesn't exactly come as a complete surprise either. It just happens, leaving you scratching your head muttering "Well, alright, I guess we'll eat at Denny's". And that's really the death of the film.
What little set up to the finale there is comes across and aloof and harmless, but by the end you could easily see how with the right director, and the right leading man, this could have been a great noir film, or at the very least, a great black comedy. Instead, this is mindless, by the book, Hollywood entertainment.
One of the running theme's of this film is stated by Morgan Freeman than repeated twice by Wilson saying "Sometimes things are exactly as they seem." No truer are these words than when spoken about this film. It is exactly what it seems from it's trailer and promotional material: mediocre, amusing fluff that is solid 'here today, gone tommorow' entertainment. Nothing special, and certainly not worthy of having the words 'Elmore Leonard' anywhere near it. I, myself, am setting out today to find a copy of the 1969 Ryan O'Neil version in hopes that maybe, just maybe, it treats the source material with a little more reverence.
Pyul MacTackle
