Owen Wilson is an even better reason than Drew Barrymore to see almost any movie and I had a reasonably good time at both The Big Bounce and Starsky & Hutch. The Hawaiian setting of The Big Bounce was especially gratifying during my first New York winter. But here the problem is that the movie is too likeable for its nasty-ironic plot. It's as if Wilson's amiability broke the story's yolk--what seems in plot-terms to be a nightmarish escapade about a small-time thief sexually suckered into taking the fall for a more malevolent gang, turns into a runny romance of temptation with the feckless, affable protagonist treated as a hero because he gets away with the money.

Wilson is all about the comedy of amorality. He plays out our fantasy of being so attractive we can get away with anything, provided it's on a limited scale. He's a crime-plotter with no grandiosity and in The Big Bounce in particular it's as if he understood that an overambitious criminal scheme would be too much like work. Wilson is able to keep this act in the realm of comedy because his persona doesn't have a hint of sadism and his movies aren't realistic enough for suffering to have any presence. He's the new generation's Peter Pan, without the icky sexual ambiguity of the original character (what makes Peter Pan appealing to Michael Jackson). Owen Wilson is a Peter Pan who fucks: as any working adult knows, the guys who refuse to grow up get laid more. What makes Wilson a star is that he doesn't coast on his blondness (the nose wouldn't allow him to get by on looks alone). He has a personally erratic style of delivery as original as Judy Holliday's. He noodges out stray thoughts in a way that puts the rhythm of scenes off-kilter, and then follows out the doodly trajectory made up of those stray thoughts and eccentric rhythms.

But the material of The Big Bounce has Elmore Leonard's dark comic sense of mortality: fools playing deadly tricks at syncopated cross-purposes. It would have been something to talk about if Wilson had been pushed to add another layer to his sun-freckled persona, and I would have bet that George Armitage, the director of two ironic tough-guy comedy classics, Miami Blues (1990) starring Alec Baldwin and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) starring John Cusack, would have been the man to do it for him. I would have lost.

Sara Foster as the bad little plaything who snares Wilson shouldn't go unmentioned. She has the physical assets for the part of an amorally self-indulgent brat but she's not a narcissistic performer, passing off TV-babe sleekness for character. She can act--she keeps springing her perversity on Wilson, and on us--but she also has a natural quality that gives her acting an unforced style. She manages to seem as if we were watching her on a hidden camera without violating the comic idiom of the movie.