Shot With Its Own Gun

Stolen moments: Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman kick back.

The Big Bounce undermines crime-movie cliches, then undermines itself.

by Sam Adams

Its charms as easy and intangible as a tropical breeze, The Big Bounce is a caper movie with no interest in capers, the My Darling Clementine of heist movies. Like Jackie Brown, also adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, it’s what Quentin Tarantino would call a "hangout movie," where the plot (such as it is) is just a pretext to spend a couple of hours soaking in the atmosphere of guileless illegality. Though it’s eventually consumed by the tiresome everybody’s-scamming-everybody plot (shades of David Mamet’s soulless Heist), The Big Bounce stops at every roadside attraction along the way.

"Hawaii's the end of the line," cracks Walter, Morgan Freeman's district judge. "People never seem to go on to Tokyo." Indeed, The Big Bounce's Oahu has the feel of a last-stop oasis, a refuge for non-self-starters and minor-league scammers. In other words, the perfect new home for Jack Ryan (Owen Wilson), a "semiretired" petty thief and con man looking to go straight, though not looking too hard. In fact, he's had a straight job for all of a few minutes of screen time before he's landed back in jail, after Jack ends a confrontation with his bellicose foreman (Snatch's Vinnie Jones) by popping him in the jaw with a baseball bat. Luckily, nothing seems to last for long on Oahu, and soon Jack is a free man, since construction magnate Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise) would rather have him off the island than in jail. But with nowhere to go, Jack stays, and Walter, not a fan of his law-bending former boss, hooks him up with a job at the small resort he runs on the side.

If everyone on Oahu seems to be working an angle, they're none too sharp about it. But where Get Shorty mocked its incompetent hoods, The Big Bounce finds their ineffectiveness charming, even redemptive: They're no good at being bad. Before he meets Nancy (Sara Foster), Ray's opportunistic mistress, Jack's biggest job is swiping $600 from sunbathing sorority sisters, and even then, he spends most of the movie trying to dispose of their wallets. He has no dreams of Tony Montana excess; he'd rather surf, work his new day job and maybe steal the occasional car, just to keep in shape. Baseball bats notwithstanding, he hasn't got a belligerent bone in his body. When the grudge-holding foreman dispatches flunky Bob Jr. (Charlie Sheen) to scare Jack off the island, Walter heads him off, but Bob tries to rile his intended victim by slurring his masculinity: "You gonna let him fight your battles for you?" Jack shrugs, enthusiastically refusing the bait. "He seems to be doing a pretty good job."

It's up to Sara, as ambitious as Jack is content, to raise his sights to Ray, the island's biggest target. Jack happily concludes that the job is out of his league -- he's smalltime, and determined to stay that way -- but Nancy's ample (and amply displayed) charms get the better of him, and soon he's reading right out of her playbook. Before succumbing to the rote romance, director George Armitage teases their flirtation out as long as he can, lingering on a shot of Nancy's toes resting on Jack's leg, soaking up the tension between them. ("Let's do something that makes the sex better afterwards," Nancy suggests, long before they actually get down to it.) Foster brings an athletic grace to her first movie role, but she can't escape the fact that her character is equal parts plot contrivance and window dressing, the snap of chewing gum without the flavor.

It's with great reluctance that The Big Bounce drags itself into the climactic heist -- you half expect Jack to sit it out like Bob le flambeur -- and wraps up its carelessly arranged double-crosses with appalling haste. The logic of the genre dictates that he who gets the money wins, but if Jack doesn't care, why should we? The movie's idea of bliss is old men trading stories over dominos and Wild Turkey (Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton join Freeman in the game), not a limousine ride with a curvy beach bunny. The tacked-on ending, which just screams reshoot, is as appallingly false as the (mercifully unused) alternate ending on the DVD of To Live and Die in L.A. , where William Petersen is reassigned to the Arctic Circle instead of getting his face blown off. It's surprising that, while Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues, full-frontal assaults on gangster cliches, made it through relatively unscathed (if separated by enough years to suggest Armitage's lack of commercial mojo), The Big Bounce's subtler subversion arrives in obviously mutilated form. (Just wait until they try and sell the "optional deleted ending" as a DVD extra.) Perhaps studios appreciate a baseball bat to the jaw better than a poke in the ribs.

THE BIG BOUNCE

Directed by George Armitage

A Warner Brothers release

Opens Friday at area theaters