 |
|||
 |
 |
||
 | |||
 | |||||||||||
|
|
A Warner Brothers release. Written by Sebastian Gutierrez; directed by George Armitage; starring Owen Wilson, Sara Foster and Morgan Freeman. Released to DVD on July 20, 2004.  Owen Wilson positively radiates charm and charisma. His voice, cadence (drawl) and delivery are all surprisingly unique for a leading man in Hollywood and serve to create an instant warmth for Wilson’s characters. The man is second to none when it comes to playing likeable guys. The problem that comes with Wilson’s ability to quickly garner audience sympathy is that his affable nature can occasionally serve to disguise some major faults of the movie project. As a director, this is a big plus for an actor to have. As an audience member, this can get very irritating, very quickly, as was the case in director George Armitage’s latest movie, The Big Bounce. Adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, The Big Bounce is yet another movie about quirky small time crooks who have big ideas. Wilson stars as Jack Ryan (neither the Tom Clancy creation or the former Illinois senate candidate), a petty thief who winds up in Hawaii on the lam from some past, unmentioned troubles in his life. After cold-cocking his construction foreman with a baseball bat, a kindly judge who owns a small resort, Walter (Morgan Freeman), offers Jack a place to stay in return for some handyman duties. While Jack is settling into his new life, he meets Nancy (Sara Foster), an attractive girl who is known to be the mistress of Hawaiian powerbroker, Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise). Never one to shy away from a tempestuous and inadvisable situation or an attractive blonde, Jack takes up with Nancy and is intrigued by the scheme she has concocted to relieve Ritchie of $200,000. Obviously inspired by the pulp writings of author Jim Thompson, Leonard’s crime stories are of a very similar ilk. Complete with petty crooks, femme fatales, cheating husbands and police who harbor secrets, The Big Bounce is vintage Leonard (and slightly more tongue-in-cheek Thompson). Popular well before comedy-caper writers Carl Hiassen (Striptease) and Dave Barry (Big Trouble) burst onto the scene in the mid-‘80s–both of whom also are weekly columnists for the Miami Herald–Leonard’s material now seems slightly dated. His characters aren’t anywhere near as outlandish, funny and eccentric as Barry’s, his stories aren’t anywhere near as off-the-wall as Hiassen’s or as complicated and twist-driven as playwright-cum-film director David Mamet’s. In short, everything in The Big Bounce is available in significantly better form in other movies, including some previous adaptations of Leonard’s work like Get Shorty and Out of Sight.  The flip side to this statement is that there is nothing particularly terrible about The Big Bounce–Wilson is fantastic as happy-go-lucky Jack and the Hawaiian setting quite lush and pleasing to the eye–but the movie just isn’t that interesting. While Armitage showed a deft touch to smoothly and effortlessly mix comedy, romance and action in his previous film Grosse Pointe Blank, the results here in The Big Bounce are nowhere near as fluid. Which, for a third time, brings me back to the very dry nature of the plot. Even at 88 minutes, this project is simply too long to investigate all the lead-ups to a shockingly low-tech crime that consists of Jack walking into a private residence when no one else is there and taking $200,000 out of a safe that’s combination he knows. There is no alarm on the house, no locks he has to pick (the key to the door in under the welcome mat), no safes he has to drill, nothing that Jack or the audience has to worry about. And creating a captivating and intriguing film that has little in the way of inherent tension is as close to impossible as a movie-making task can be. Having spent the better part of a weekend dissecting The Big Bounce in my mind, I find myself returning again and again to the famous Shakespearian quotation from MacBeth. "It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." While Leonard is anything but an idiot, this silver screen adaptation of his novel is filled with big name actors, gratuitous shots of good-looking women in bikinis and surfers who are all doing their part to conceal the supreme nothingness at the heart of this project.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Prior to Tbe Big Bounce, actress Sara Foster's only Hollywood experience came hosting an MTV show. |
| |||||
