Dead Cat Bounce

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Stock market analysts have a term for it: "dead cat bounce". It's when the price of a stock falls and falls, suddenly stops, goes back up again, then falls down to where it stopped the first time. The point is not to be fooled by the fact that after a cat falls off a tall building, it bounces back up when it hits bottom: that doesn't mean it's alive. Dead cats just bounce.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The Big Bounce is a lifeless, uninteresting film starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, and a bunch of other talented performers, none of whom do any actual acting here. It has a plot (I suppose) which is somehow about various people scamming each other, and I think we're supposed to get caught up in the twists and turns.

But there aren't any. The film's in free fall nearly the whole time. It banks this way or that way, but with no apparent point to any of it. Wilson delivers wry jokes with his trademark aw-shucks drawl. Freeman offers bits of wisdom with a sidelong gaze. Sara Foster pouts flirtatiously in very little (if any) clothing. Gary Sinise, Charlie Sheen, and Bebe Neuwirth all have pointless minor roles. Et cetera. Not even Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton (in trivial roles that could hardly justify travelling to Hawaii for filming) add any energy to it.

Finally, near the end, some of the supposed double- and triple-crossing happens, and the "things are/n't exactly what they appear to be" warning actually comes into play. There's a brief indication that things are about to get interesting. But they don't. It's just a dead cat bounce. And when everything finally falls into place at the end... well, I suppose it's possible that all the pieces really did fit together at that point. But I really didn't care enough to try to figure it out. It was still a dead cat.

Nathan commented that the one redeeming trait of the film was the scenery. The shots of balmy Hawaii, surfings, sunny beaches, and so on were a nice break from the dark, grey, frigid local weather.

This movie was nowhere near as painful to sit through as, say, an Adam Sandler vehicle, or a feature film based on an SNL skit. But it made just as little sense, whether in terms of plot, this array of talent signing up to make the film*, or spending the better part of ten bucks each to see it.

*Unless it was just for the excuse to spend some time in Hawaii.