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83By not trying too hard, this remake of a dumb movie has got spring in its step. The bounce is on us.
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80It's Wilson who's the score here. Quick, scruffy and completely at ease, he takes on Jack's let-it-ride charms and foibles as if he were tossing a Frisbee with friends, and it's impossible to watch him without wanting in on the game.
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75Like the frosty tropical drinks the people keep sipping here, it's refreshing and icy-cool, a sinful pleasure mixed by experts.
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75Wilson is the main reason to see The Big Bounce, where he's perfect as a reasonably smart guy who often seems to have no idea what he's getting into. The other reasons are a solid supporting cast.
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75It gets wackier as it goes, starting with Charlie Sheen cast against type as a guy who's getting no sex and turns down the chance. Bebe Neuwirth has some funny scenes as a lush.
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63There's some entertainment value, but the production as a whole is unfocused.
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60It's too loose and casual, all too willing to trade the writer's trademark wit and literary mischief for slapstick comedy.
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60It’s sexy, offbeat fun for the most part, but it’s way too laid-back for its own good and, in the end, obstinately refuses to be anything more than the sum of its highly promising parts.
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60When the general pleasantness of the atmosphere and the cleverness of the screenplay don't carry the movie, Wilson does -- at least until a hurried, confounding finale that reveals its casualness as sloppiness.
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58This is one of those capers doomed to unravel in comic chaos, but it finally plays less like a con gone wrong than a long, lazy, insubstantial shaggy dog story coasting on nothing but charm.
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50The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.
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50A sexy crime story. The double-crossing complications don't make much sense, but it's fun to watch Wilson turn the hard-boiled dialogue into a series of ironic one-liners under the hot Oahu sun.
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50That The Big Bounce works at all is a testament to Wilson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter ("The Royal Tenenbaums") who probably could have come up with something better in his sleep.
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50Doesn't take itself seriously, and that's a good thing.
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50Breezy, sleazy and a little bit wheezy, The Big Bounce combines a short running time, a portrait of island-life corruption, and a retro surf-and-scam plot. Throw in a vintage, funky-soul soundtrack and you have the ingredients of ever so many bad television shows.
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50The movie, brief though it is, feels as padded as a travelogue.
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50At 80 minutes, it feels truncated and abandoned -- a sketch of a comic thriller rather than the real thing.
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50The best Elmore Leonard adaptations ("Jackie Brown," "Out of Sight") play behind the beat, and although The Big Bounce isn't top-shelf Dutch, the film finds its own pace.
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50The low-wattage thrills, lukewarm jokes and unconvincing caricatures we encounter in The Big Bounce simply don't generate that kind of excitement.
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50The usual double-crosses and convolutions ensue, but the narrative is so haphazard that the whole thing -- both the caper and the movie that contains it -- seems to have been hastily improvised.
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50The first half-hour or so of this caper comedy, which is based on an Elmore Leonard crime novel, goes down like a strawberry daiquiri with a little umbrella.
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50Modestly engaging, albeit instantly forgettable shaggy-dog story only gradually reveals itself as a seriocomic take on standard-issue noir.
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40Gutierrez keeps some of Leonard's tart dialogue, but not enough to hide the fact that the story has no momentum -- those gratuitous shots of pro-sufers shooting curls don't compensate -- and there's zero chemistry between the whiny Wilson and Foster, who has yet to make the transition from model to actress.
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40To be fair to this film, the only real thing holding it together is the cast, which is one of the best ensembles in a while.
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40By the way, good luck making sense out of the final fifteen minutes. I'd say people were asleep at the wheel on this one but the film is so pointlessly all over the place that I'm not sure there even was one.
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40The movie is a garage-sale conglomeration of anecdotes and oddballs.
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38Mostly, though, The Big Bounce isn't offensive, or even terrible. It's just lazy, relying on numb moviegoers to fork over cash thinking they'll see the next "Get Shorty" or "Out of Sight."
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30The worst thing about Bounce isn't that it's bad but that it just isn't interesting.
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30There may once have been a real movie rattling inside the empty studio package known as The Big Bounce, but no longer.
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30Go in with lowered expectations, and expect to have them dashed.
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30A film so boring, unsexy, styleless, sluggish and physically ugly that its badness seems almost intentional.
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30Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.
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25Except for a rare scene of shaggy charm, nothing works. Nothing.
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25A dreadful exercise, with a script full of contradictions and empty gestures and a leading lady who's such a novice it hurts to watch her.
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25No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.
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20An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.
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