Flak Magazine: Review of The Big Bounce, 02.13.04

The Hollywood doldrums are here, and along comes The Big Bounce, an Elmore Leonard-flavored Hawaiian getaway, in which, it seems Magnum and T.C. could appear at any turn. With big names like Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman and a shoddy $3 million opening, The Big Bounce reeks of something Warner Bros. conceived as a summer genre fling but for some reason gave up on.

The movie is the second adaptation of Leonard's first crime novel. (Or maybe it's a remake of the 1969 adaptation starring Ryan O'Neal. Who can tell these days?) As with most Leonard stories, the summary is deceptively simple: Owen Wilson plays Jack Ryan, a surfer and two-bit hood who doesn't work for the CIA. After Jack is taken under the wing of local judge Walter Crewes (Freeman), he gets mixed up with his ex-boss's mistress, Nancy (Sara Foster). A comely chica fatale with a taste for criminal danger, Nancy lures Jack — by way of undressing a lot — into an intricate scheme to pinch $200,000 from her lover (Gary Sinise). Naturally, it becomes evident that Nancy is not your typical steal-a-car-on-the-first-date kind of girl — or is she? — fulfilling the movie's poorly proofread tagline, "Who's scamming who?"

In previous films, director George Armitage did well to let his stars just be stars. Just as Alec Baldwin made Miami Blues and John Cusack owned Grosse Pointe Blank, this is Wilson's show. Resurrecting most of the charm he had as Dignan in Bottle Rocket, Wilson continues to prove that he can still be a genuine leading man without fixing his busted nose. Leonard's leads always have a hard-boiled cool that makes the novels entertaining but can also give actors room for drollness that Hollywood pictures don't always offer, and so Wilson's wit — usually more apparent when he's Wes Anderson's writing partner — is comfortable here. He also provides a good sounding board for former model Foster, whose first screen role seems all the less stilted thanks to the chemistry generated (mostly from Wilson's side) in their antisocial romance. He has a knack for understated comedy, and boy, she is purty, but these are no big revelations.

Unfortunately, that's all there is to say. The story unravels like a string bikini, minus the stimulation. The failure rests in part upon the script by Sebastian Gutierrez, who probably got the job because his agent, in a fit of industry genius, mentioned he wrote for "Karen Sisco," the ill-fated Out of Sight TV spin-off. Part of the genius of Leonard's fiction is loopy plotting that misleads but never cheats. Presumably caught up in the Wilson-Foster romance — although that, too, is underdeveloped — Gutierrez loses the plot like a shaker of salt, vaguely wrapping up the con in the film's final moments. At one point Freeman's sage character says, "Some things are exactly how they seem." If that's so, here's how it seems: Leonard's characteristic convolutions aren't resolved or even pleasantly obscure. They're just convoluted.

Nonetheless, The Big Bounce is really the most displeasing when you realize how much cooler-with-a-capital-C it could have been had it stuck closer to Leonard — most seriously, the movie is uprooted to Oahu for no apparent reason. The tropical setting is less of a problem than the lei'd-back qualities that accompany it. Put another way: Some of the fault lies with Pulp Fiction.

Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction made crime stories hard-boiled again. Postmodern discourse and annoying copycats notwithstanding, Pulp Fiction reset a precedent of '70s pulp energy and machismo that led to a wittier, more stylish vision for Leonard's crime comedies, namely Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Tarantino's own Jackie Brown. The Big Bounce, on the other hand, feels like the uninspired studio package that it is. Outside of Wilson, any style here is owed to the choice north shore environs, and Armitage succeeds in capturing it more as a state of mind than as a locale. It makes for some good beach noir, but you also get the feeling that both director and cast approached their jobs as if they were paid Club Med vacation. Sure, nothing says "cool" like conning some schmuck and then sipping rum from a coconut next to salty Sara Foster. But the execution lacks Tarantino's auteur insight, or even Steven Soderbergh's showboating.

The Big Bounce came out during Hollywood's slow winter season, and you don't have to be Noam Chomsky to know that an ulterior motive of Oscar hype is to divert public attention from Hollywood's creative accounting. While moviegoers discuss nominees and make picks in questionably legal Oscar pools, studios sweep their dreck under the red carpet. And in some cases they expect to claim huge losses on it come tax time.

Maybe Freeman is right; some things are exactly how they seem.

— Tony Nigro (tony@superheronamedtony.com)