Running Time: 99 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Do you think actors can tell when they’ve signed on to a bad movie? I do. I think after a couple days on the set of The Big Bounce, Morgan Freeman and Owen Wilson must have realized that they were stuck on a movie with a director who has no sense of pacing, a script with no interest in its own story, and tried to make the best of it. That’s pretty easy to do on Hawaii, so they kicked back, relaxed, and took their paycheck. The audience does not have it
The story, such as it is, concerns small-time burglar Jack (Owen Wilson). He’s just been arrested for beating up his foreman (Vinnie Jones, in one of many random virtual cameos by actors who needed a mortgage payment) in one of many scenes that only works because of Wilson’s breezy charm. The judge on the island (Morgan Freeman) is looking at the video of the beating and is impressed. Soon, Jack’s been offered a job as caretaker at the judge’s bungalow hotel and is enjoying the sights when he notices the lovely Nancy (Sara Foster) who is the mistress of developer Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise; another virtual cameo). He thinks Nancy’s attracted to him and pretty soon, they’re carrying on an affair under the nose of Ray and his underling, Bob (Charlie Sheen).
Because this is a heist movie, there must be a big stash of money waiting to be stolen. Sure ‘nough, Nancy knows of a big amount kept by Ray at his house. Despite Ray’s wife (Bebe Neuwrith) coming back home unexpectedly and the judge’s constant warnings about Nancy wanting something more than a future with him, Jack persists in his heist plans. Pretty soon the heist is in motion and within ten minutes we learn that not everything is not as it seems and weird little plot twists cloud everything. Of course in a good movie, this would be done interestingly and with a sense of urgency. In this movie, though, it is done with a sense of “Oh yeah…the movie needs to be over.”
Director George Armitage (Grosse Pointe Blank) seems to have never made a movie before. How else to explain scenes where characters speak of events that happened that we, as an audience, have no idea what is being spoken of? There is also his annoying habit of cutting to stock footage of surfers and the beaches of Hawaii every ten minutes or so when the action begins to lag. As lovely as a travelouge from Hawaii is, it hardly helps the pacing of a light thriller-”comedy”. I put comedy in quotation marks because the writer, Sebastian Gutierrez, seems to have never read anything by Elmore Leonard and is unfamiliar with how to combine breezy with funny. Instead we get sluggish.
Owen Wilson, though his breezy charm is certainly to his advantage, looks uncomfortable towards the end of the film. Possibly because he just got the memo that all the expository details about the plot twists at the end had been sacrificed for another beach shot. As a proud member of of the “Would Watch Morgan Freeman Read A Phone Book Club,” I’m in position to criticize his performance except to say he gets off the best line of the movie (“God is an imaginary friend for grownups.”). Charlie Sheen looks uneasy about playing a character that isn’t smooth or suave. The less about Sara Foster, the better. Though she starts off well, she has two tones of acting: pouty and “alluring.” There is no doubt of her sex appeal; her acting appeal, though, is nonexistent. Sinise, Jones, and Neuwrith in their virtual cameos just look confused as to why they’re even there. Adding to the oddness of casting is Willie Nelson in two scenes with about ten lines. His appearance on camera (in some better movie, somewhere) might suggest a red herring about the plot, but in this, it just means that they gave one of entertainment’s most interesting personalities an uninteresting character who has nothing to do with the plot.
Eventually the movie has to end and it does, though not enjoyably. In a breezy heist movie (think Ocean’s Eleven), the actors either have to be invested enough to create memorable characters who aren’t sterotypes or have characters who are multi-faceted or just be in situations so cool that you don’t really care. The Big Bounce does not have this. It has stock characters inhabited by actors more interested in their paycheck in situations as generic as if they’d filmed the movie anywhere in the world. But with stock footage from surfers and Hawaiian beaches. Gotta have the stock footage.