January 30, 2004 | So insubstantial that it practically evaporates while you’re watching it, The Big Bounce is a mild and hazy comic caper in which the actors spend most of their time traipsing like tourists through swaths of spectacular Hawaiian scenery. It’s easy to imagine that the entire cast and crew flew to Oahu on a whim, and didn’t worry much about coming up with a plot until they were settled into their hotel rooms. It’s every bit as easy to imagine someone – maybe Owen Wilson, the laid-back star — casually offering a suggestion: “Hey, I bought this paperback in the airport newsstand, why don’t we film this ?”
As it turns out, the movie actually is based on a 1969 potboiler by Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and Out of Sight . The novel isn’t in the same league as Leonard’s later, funnier books – indeed, it was his very first attempt at crime fiction – and you could argue that screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez has improved on the original by adding plot twists and comic business to make his script seem, well, more like an Elmore Leonard novel. Even so, the movie is so amiably haphazard as it saunters from scene that you can’t help suspecting the actors simply made things up as they went along.
Owen Wilson once again does his insouciant surfer-dude thing in the lead role of Jack Ryan. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that Leonard claimed that name for his character long before Tom Clancy used the moniker for his C.I.A. hero.) The big difference in The Big Bounce is that, for once, Wilson really is playing a guy who surfs.
(Trivia buffs, take note: Leonard’s novel previously was filmed, quite badly, back in 1969 with Ryan O’Neal as a tediously glum Jack Ryan.)
To finance his fun in the sun during an extended Hawaiian sojourn, Jack does construction work for Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise), a shady real estate wheeler-dealer who’s ignoring protests by locals while building a luxury resort in Oahu . Early on, however, Jack loses his job after settling a dispute with a bullying foreman (British footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones) by applying a baseball bat to the other fellow’s jaw.
The rough stuff amuses Walter Crewes (a wily Morgan Freeman), a friendly district judge who hires Jack as handyman for his not-quite-palatial hotel. Nancy Hayes (Sara Foster), Ritchie’s mistress, also is impressed by Ryan, especially when she learns of the burglary charges on his arrest record. After teasing Ryan with her taste for cheap thrills – vandalism, unlawful entry and other naughty behavior that she describes as “bounces” – she recruits him in a scheme to liberate $200,00 from Ritchie’s hunting-lodge safe.
Director George Armitage ( Grosse Pointe Blank ) does a reasonably efficient job of maintaining some semblance of narrative momentum, despite the telltale signs of last-minute re-editing and restructuring: Abruptly truncated subplots, scenes that feel radically shortened, prominently billed actors (especially Sinise and Jones) who make only fleeting appearances. Overall, The Big Bounce generates a pleasant vibe, due in no small measure to Wilson , whose ingratiating performance sets the prevailing mood of off-the-cuff humor and off-the-wall absurdity.
