Big Nothing Review

"Big Nothing" reviews

Movie

Big Nothing

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2006-11-24 16:01:26

Provider

Review

A title tipping it's hat towards the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, Big Nothing could only be another slice of neo-noir. Happily it combines elements of the wisecracking thriller with the loser comedy, familiar from a recent spate of films featuring hapless, misfiring crooks. There's more of the latter than the former, which is fortunate since the two principals are played by UK favourite Simon Pegg and David Schwimmer, still trying to shake off his dippy character from Friends.

Set in Oregon, but filmed in Canada, Wales and the Isle Of Man, it stars Schwimmer as Charlie, an unemployed teacher who becomes embroiled in events way beyond his reach, as revealed by his opening voiceover, where he admits "I made a big mistake". Gus (Pegg) is the cause of that mistake; a conman Charlie meets when, out of desperation, he takes a job in a call-centre and is persuaded by his new colleague to get involved in a scheme to blackmail a paedophile priest. It all goes hopelessly wrong and having found themselves in a hole, the dunderheaded duo keep digging.

Big Nothing owes a debt to the sub-genre of knowingly hip thrillers that are the province of the Coen brothers, and there's nothing outlandishly original about this film, which arrives in the wake of Brick, Lucky Number Slevin and the rest. But it produces an enjoyable, if slight, black comedy of a kind Pegg now seems to specialise in. It also gives Schwimmer a better screen role than any his former colleagues have found since leaving the comforts of Manhattan.

Slick, sharp and smartly underplayed - Big Nothing amounts to quite a bit in the end.