"The Big Bounce" is not a boring film, but it is certainly unremarkable. It is too often the case that the film feels like a six-episode television series that has been scrapped and then condensed down into a 100 minute feature. It is rich in character diversity and snappy put-downs; overflowing with a sense of people coming and going in and out of one another's universes that can often be refreshing and is laden with micro-narratives pertaining to heists; betrayals and collapsing marriages, but there is no finished product – no substance to really sink one's teeth into.
Owen Wilson plays Jack Ryan (no, not that one) – a handsome conman who has served time for his petty crimes but now lies low on a Hawaiian island and works on a construction site. He's cool; calm and amusing. When he breaks the law, in infiltrating the glamorous surroundings of a beach house hosting a pool party so as to nab a couple of hundred in notes to tide himself over, he does it in such a way that we cannot quite hate him for it.
Ryan lands himself in some trouble when he clobbers a foreman with a baseball bat following an altercation on his work-site that involves protesters unhappy at the desecration of their lands to make way for a new hotel. Fired, and told menacingly by the henchman (played by Charlie Sheen) of his ex-boss that he should leave the island, he finds solace in working as a handyman for Morgan Freeman's district judge Walter Crewes on a small holiday-camp he runs on the side.
It is around this time that he meets Nancy (Sara Foster), a blonde twenty-something beach-bimbo with a backstory of city-based exotic dancing and a fetish for criminality – not a dangerous girl, but one who is fast and loose and too pretty for Ryan to turn away from when she demonstrates an interest in him. The reason for this is, of course, that he himself has a penchant for criminality, albeit petty burglaries. The relationship occupies the bulk of the film's middle third – Nancy, already having an affair with the chap who wants to build that hotel, is thus able to garner access to yachts and luxury villas otherwise off-limits where the endless teasing; flirting and talking plays out.
Sadly, there is no real substance to this core relationship: Nancy is turned on by criminals and Jack commits crimes. Elmore Leonard, author of the novel from many years earlier upon which the film is based, would later bring a character similar to Jack Ryan together with a federal marshal in "Out of Sight" – two binaries that should repel but who eventually come to attract. Rum Punch, later adapted as "Jackie Brown", possessed at the core of it a far tougher love story to bring to life between the eponymous Brown and Max Cherry.
Eventually, Nancy digs out that the man to whom she plays mistress possesses the sum of $200,000 nearby – located, as it happens, in a safe in one of these luxurious homes he owns. She hits upon the idea that they could steal it, but Ryan already has an angry foreman in a neck-brace out for payback; an on-off criminal accomplice in the form of Frank (Gregory Sporleder) saying he needs $1500 to pay off some bad people and a job to hold down for Crewes who has his own plans for Ryan...
The film is not remarkably well made – it is bouncy in that way "Get Shorty" and "Jackie Brown" are without ever being frivolous, but does not amount to the satisfying experience those films were. We are provided with endless shots of surfers to transist between scenes, while the close ups of the rolling white waves as they crash into the beach as Nancy and Jack make love is just clumsy. On one occasion, there is a particularly silly sequence whereby Nancy nips back and forth between the first and ground floors of a house to appease Jack and another male visitor (with whom she is additionally having an affair) without the other knowing either of them is present.
There is a certain style and a certain logic to the film, although I am perplexed as to why one character seems to spend the duration of the film trying to talk Ryan out of doing something which is crucial to a plan of his own that he has up his sleeve for later on. When all is said and done, this is tough to recommend as both a genre piece and as a standalone accomplishment.
