Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Big Bang

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss their thoughts over a nice meal of Japanese food cooked using an atom collider. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’re checking out The Big Bang, where Antonio Banderas stars as a private detective on the hunt for a missing woman. Also stars James Van Der Beek.

Next Week: White Irish Drinkers – Set in 70s Brooklyn, this celebrated indie focuses on a pair of brothers trying to escape their drunkard father and doomed lifestyle.

SPOILERS BELOW

Jeremiah White:  I don’t know if physics and genre storytelling will ever be successfully blended in the world of film, but if John Cusack’s adaptation of A.C. Weisbecker’s novel Cosmic Banditos ever comes to fruition, I’ll be very disappointed that The Big Bag was released first. Weisbecker’s tale of drug smuggling fugitives with frequent physics tangents is funny, outrageous and confusing, where Tony Krantz’s contrived neo-noir is unfunny, boring and meaningless.

Nothing in The Big Bang really works, largely because none of the pieces ever seem to fit. Antonio Banderas strains credulity as a hard-boiled detective and it doesn’t help that he’s saddled with subpar tough guy one-liners. The physics digressions are delivered in a bland, flat way that made my eyes glaze over. The interrogation room framing device robs the story of narrative momentum. Many characters are introduced and dispatched so suddenly that their only purpose is to work in stunt casting choices like Snoop Dogg and James Van Der Beek.

The Big Bang runs right down the checklist of bad neo-noir elements: lame puns, uninteresting twists, excessively stylized visuals. It’s all there. When The Big Bang grows tired of its own detective story aspirations is when it’s at its most entertaining. The “asshole” exchange between Delroy Lindo and Thomas Kretschmann in the desert was the only time I remember laughing. The final shootout is far more energetic and exciting than anything that precedes it. And Banderas trying to outrun a particle collider induced opening of the earth is ludicrous and stupid, but finally it seemed like Krantz and screenwriter Erik Jendresen were actually embracing that side of their film.

If The Big Bang embraced its goofiness more often, the overindulgent physics lectures and sloppy structure might have been more palatable. Hopefully, Cusack can learn from Krantz’s mistakes.

Sometimes a dude comes along and just wants to talk physics...

Jeff Hart: Maybe I’m just a sucker for dumb pulp thrills, and I’m certainly in the minority (at least according to its abysmal Metacritic score), but I actually enjoyed The Big Bang. I’ll grant that some of Jeremiah’s criticism is fair, particularly about the inane stunt casting of Snoop Dogg and James Van Der Beek, whose characters exist only to inject some low brow diversions, and thus, like Jeremiah mentioned, make a jumbled narrative all the more uneven. But isn’t that par for the course with good noir?

While we never get a real sense of his character beyond the Philip Marlowe with a Spanish accent archetype, I thought Banderas was a more than capable lead. His digressive narration worked for me and I thought he handled the colorful language and bad puns inherent to the part well. In response to a flaming midget: “he’s a white dwarf that just went supernova.” Come on – that’s great! Not sure where Jeremiah is getting his tough guy read from as – up until the final act – Banderas doesn’t show much of a mean-streak. It isn’t until his El Mariachi-ness rears its head, a handcuffed Banderas doing one of those sweet emergency brake jack-knife maneuvers while gunning down two men through a car window, that he began to strain credulity for me.

The physics metaphor that pervades the writing provided a clever contrast for Banderas’ investigation, one that creates a shallow pulp candy union between love and the so-called God particle. It’s dumb, yes, but it is just some added color to keep the mystery lively. At least, that’s what it should be. When The Big Bang begins to actually put its physics motif front and center rather than keep it as interesting shading on the edges is when the film started to lose me. I didn’t want the film to embrace its goofiness and I certainly didn’t want to see Banderas outdriving a crumbling roadway like something out of a Roland Emmerich flick. The only way to salvage that sequence, and perhaps the film, is to have Banderas and company plummet to their demise. To have him drive into the sunset with a load of diamonds and a pair of hot chicks is insanely contrary to the film’s tone and the noir tradition.

Also, I’d like to point out that the longest of the physics digressions that Jeremiah found so intolerable took place during an extremely acrobatic sex scene. Your eyes glazed over? That’s gross, dude. Way to bring down the level of this Big Bang discussion with your coded masturbation language.

Anyway, The Big Bang is a serviceable piece of noir that eventually attempts to get too profound and ambitious for its own good. It’s worth watching purely for pulp thrills, but only if you’re into that sort of thing. Like, really into it. Also, perfect for fans of Kurgan. He delivers his best performance yet. Go Kurgan!