Superficially, The Big Bang follows all the rules and clichés of the of
the "tough L.A. detective" genre that first became popular in the old
black-and-white days. As in the Spade and Marlowe stories and the endless
string of films created in the spirit of those novels, the poor but honest
private eye is hired for what seems like a simple case with a good payoff,
but he eventually finds himself enmeshed in a tangled web of lies and
conspiracies involving the highest levels of wealth and power. Along the
way, he does a lot of narration, gets lied to constantly, runs into some
sexy dames, interrogates some reluctant bartenders, gets sideswiped by
crooked cops, gets roughed up by some big galoots, flashes his roscoe, and
runs into some rich people with powerful strains of mental illness in
their family histories. Everything is complicated, and nothing is as it
first seems. That's a pretty accurate description of both The Big Bang and
The Big Sleep.
Antonio Banderas plays the private dick who is hired by a gigantic
ex-con to find a stripper who wrote to him while he was in the joint.
After a series of misadventures and red herrings in L.A., Banderas ends up
out in the New Mexico desert because the missing stripper turns out to be
the wife, and virtually the captive, of a crazy billionaire who is
executing a wild scheme out there under the sands. "The crazy rich dude
without limits" is a stock character in noir detective films, but this
particular one, played by Sam Elliott, is richer and crazier than usual.
He's not just trying to corner the market on water or something. He wants
his own personal universe. Obsessed with metaphysical concepts developed
during some LSD trips, he is literally trying to re-create the big bang by
building a particle accelerator in some abandoned military facilities
beneath the New Mexico desert.
As befits such a crazy premise, the film comes up with a climax that is
truly over-the-top, and Banderas ends up using a souped-up power car to
drive away from what seems like the end of the world. The lesson here:
make sure you have plenty of gas in your tank at all times, in case you
need to speed away from Ragnarok. And also because that vintage
convertible could be completely unique and highly valuable if you can
somehow squeeze it into the newly-formed universe which emerges from the
destruction of our own. But you'll have to drive your car there, because
Mayflower charges an arm and a leg for inter-dimensional moves, and they
calculate the charge by the pound, so you can guess how much a convertible
would cost.
As similar as the two films might be on the surface, The Big Bang is
not The Big Sleep, which took itself quite seriously. I was never sure
whether The Big Bang was supposed to be a noir detective film or a
straight-faced parody of same. Maybe a bit of both. One thing is certain:
whether it is supposed to be an tongue-in-check action film, a genre
parody, or a black comedy, this film is "out there." It is a strange,
strange film in may ways. I have barely scratched the surface of it in
these paragraphs. It's not just the premise which is outlandish. The
characters are universally exaggerated and the visuals can be completely
surreal. And if you don't really care for the elements already mentioned,
let me add one more thing: Autumn Reeser's sex scene is fantastic, in
every sense of that word. Best of all, it's completely gratuitous. Not
only is the sex and nudity irrelevant and unnecessary to the plot, but
Autumn's entire character should theoretically be nothing more than an
incidental extra. She was just a waitress in a run-down dive of a coffee
shop out in the desert. Banderas asked her if she had seen the woman in a
photo. She had not. That could easily have been the last we saw of her,
except that she and Banderas seemed to like one another, and promptly
agreed to a rendezvous, which is my way of saying they fucked non-stop for
three and a half minutes. The only purpose of that scene is to entertain
you with a hot sex scene! As the Good Lord intended.
I'm writing this before the film has been released in North America,
and I haven't heard anything about the distribution plans for this movie.
I guess The Big Bang will go straight to DVD in the USA. It's not an
especially good film, and it's not the kind of film that will pack the
theaters with mainstream viewers, but it's so downright loony that it can
be fascinating. If you have a taste for the unusual, this might be your
cup of tea. I'm not saying that you will definitely like it, but I
guarantee that it will meet your minimum daily requirement for odd stuff
in a good old-fashioned exploitation film.
