Heist film offers plenty of sunny beaches, but is low on excitement and dry on laughs.
A cast of sun-drenched slackers in Tom Selleck attires and one hot babe in a bikini suit have the potential to divert the heist genre into palm tree territory; unfortunately the main attraction of director George Armitage’s PG-friendly version of Wild Things are the beautiful shots of Hawaii by second-unit directors and not the film itself.
Far from the effortlessly offbeat fun in the 1997 comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, George Armitage’s current misfire proves that remaking a film with some contemporary jive isn’t always a sure thing.
The Big Bounce commences with a cool bit showing one juicy encounter which creatively reverts itself onto a video screen which shows a confrontation between an aggressor in Vinnie Jones (Snatch) and a pacifist named Jack (Owen Wilson – The Royal Tenenbaums), sadly this first sequence is the last good one in the film.
Featured in Get Shorty caricatures, the film produces a plentiful supply of ruthless egocentric inhabitants, but one screwball scamming situation after another hardly makes this a worthwhile watch. It may be easier to warm up to other characters from Wilson’s repertoire of comedies; but this Jack character hardly does anything of interest–except look tanned. His main co-star in Sara Foster is a looker, but instead of delivering a character that wears a reinvigorated femme fatale suit, she wears a couple of bikini tops and still can’t manage to command our attention. The lackluster performance from Morgan Freeman only reminds us that we haven’t seen him in a descent role since Se7en back in 95 and the rest of the cast seem to bludgeon the film’s final rest stop in the same manner as a heavier cast did in Big Trouble.
While there are a couple of good lines as when Wilson claims that “God is an imaginary friend for grown-ups†there is nothing being said or done that seems to garner any kind of juicy momentum for the film’s final act which seems like a bunch of humorless situations pancaked over one another. It’s as if Armitage directs the film straight into a cul-de-sac, a bunch of episodes filled in between with shots of Hawaii’s big waves demonstrates the lack of direction in story development, and not even Sara Foster’s hardened nipples can scam us into liking this film.
It’s never a good sign when a film gets bounced around in a studio’s release date schedule, The Big Bounce becomes one of the rare Elmore Leonard novels which should have stayed on the bookshelf rather than make its way back onto the big-screen.
