The Big Bounce (2004)

[StevePulaski]

The Big Bounce (2004)
Directed by: George Armitage

Rating: ★★

Jack Ryan (Owen Wilson) is your typical surfer dude in Hawaii, except he has also has a background as a thief, mostly small breaking and entering crimes where he leaves with his pockets aligned with decent cash and maybe some valuables here and there. After hitting construction foreman Lou Harris (Vinnie Jones), who works for a corrupt island Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise), in the head with a bat, both Harris and the Ritchie's assistant Bob Rogers Jr. (Charlie Sheen) want Ryan to leave the island asap.

However, a resort bungalow owner and local judge Walter Crewes (Morgan Freeman) takes a liking to Jack's laidback ways, and employs him at his resort as a handymen. This gives Jack and opportunity to get closer to Nancy Hayes (Sara Foster), a bad girl who knows how to smile and bat her eyes the right way around town. "She likes the criminal type," Walter warns Jack, but Jack doesn't listen and begins to hang around with Nancy, pulling off petty heists like the kind he is used to. Nancy wants more excitement, though. It isn't long before she gets the idea to stage a $200,000 heist on Ritchie.

The Big Bounce is based off of Elmore Leonard's novel of the same name, but instead of taking place in the Michigan Thumb the story was moved to the shore of Oahu. This definitely makes the film more pleasing to look at and appealing in aesthetic, but it can't shake the fact that this film is meandering, far too directionless, and very dry as a whole. The film lacks energy and mystery for being a heist movie and adopts a persona about as lax and as breezy as its main character and location.

I often haven't read many of the books when I review their film counterparts, so all I can do is tactfully assume what Leonard's novel contained. Two of the key ingredients for a crime novel are interest and, at least, some clarity of the overall mystery. The Big Bounce has a lot of characters, who are interesting on a basic level, but never seem to channel anything but basic archetypes. The actors work with what they have in their respective roles, sure, but if they were paid by lesser-known, second-rate actors, would you remember them just as well? Owen Wilson does some fine work, and Sara Foster, for her first time, channels the sexiness someone like Hayden Panettiere but possesses the personality of an Olsen twin. Arguably the best performance in the film is given by Morgan Freeman but, really, is that much of a surprise?

There is a scene right near the end that has two characters, a man and a woman who should remain unspoiled, and the woman is talking to the man, confused about what their plan of action is now that they're about to be exposed. She keeps questioning the plan and the man continues to correct her. She only gets more and more confused. I think this is the closest the film comes with connecting the audience because nothing in The Big Bounce is clarified to the point of being digestible to the audience. By the end, I was trying to piece together what the ultimate goal of all of this was and what both parties were trying to achieve. Usually, in a crime drama, this is what the filmmakers want you to be doing, except instead of feeling like I had all the pieces somewhere in front of me, it felt as if I had a ten-piece puzzle and three pieces were on the floor, two were mistakenly thrown out, two were falsely advertized, and I was left with three that may or may not have been from the puzzle on the box.

And so The Big Bounce goes on, and on, for a surprisingly short eighty-one minutes, going from mildly-interesting, to dull, to boring, to amusing, to somewhat funny, and the cycle repeats. Eventually, it becomes more of a scenery-chewing project for several talented actors who occasionally could be mistaken for contemplating better role choices in their future during this movie.

Starring: Owen Wilson, Sara Foster, Morgan Freeman, Charlie Sheen, Gary Sinise, Vinnie Jones, Bebe Neuwirth, Willie Nelson, and Harry Dean Stanton. Directed by: George Armitage.