Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 3

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.

But in the end The Big Bounce avoids the intersection of Wilson's everybody-should-feel-good criminality and the more ruthless kind he gets caught up with. He drives off with a replacement girl while Foster is left standing on the side of the rode, in a wig, no less. She takes the fall for the movie when it makes this insipid gesture toward a conventional moral scheme that, as a work of irony, it exists to invert.

I enjoyed Starsky & Hutch more than The Big Bounce, but there's less to say about it. It's a variety show starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, who make a superb vaudeville team: Stiller is uptight and Wilson isn't. It's a teaming similar to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's in the enjoyable Road pictures from the 1940s, the teaming of a confidence man and a diffidence man. At their most inspired, trying to decide, for instance, if a biker-bar goon is tall enough for the handle Big Earl to function as an ironic nickname, Wilson and Stiller couldn't be better.

One of the great things about their teamwork is that they're both talk-it-through talkers. They don't just set each other up for one-liners as the old comedy two-acts from vaudeville and radio and early TV did. In the biker bar scene, in which they're trying to analyze an idiotic situation logically, it's like a comedy team made up of two Gracie Allens. It even works that at times they seem to be in different versions of the same movie, with Stiller parodying the TV show by replicating it too earnestly and Wilson just ambling through it. Some things work royally, others don't. Some of the guest stars (Snoop Dogg) hit and others don't. But don't let your grandparents tell you that the Hope and Crosby movies were any better than this. Enough said.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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