The Big Bang

When low-rent Los Angeles private eye Ned Cruz (Antonio Banderas) gets a

late night visit from brutal, recently paroled Russian boxer Anton the Pro
(Robert Maillet) he’s made an offer he’s not going to be allowed to refuse; Anton wants him to find the woman he loves, his stripper girlfriend
Lexie (Sienna Guillory), whose love
letters kept Anton (relatively) sane in prison. There’s also the small matter of $30 million in missing
diamonds stolen from the Russian mob.

Dogged by a trio of dodgy cops (Thomas Kretschmann, William Fichtner, Delroy Lindo), Cruz’s search
will take him from the mean streets of Hell A, encountering kinky Hollywood
action stars and porn producers who, ahem, throw themselves into their work, to
the desolate wastes of the New Mexico desert where crazed reclusive billionaire
Simon Kestral (Sam Elliot) is about to recreate the Big Bang with his own
super-collider in order to find the so-called ‘God’ particle. And just possibly bring about the end
of the world as we know it. As the
beatings, betrayals and bodies start to pile up, the end of the world may just
be the least of Cruz’s problems…

A day-glo neo-noir update of Raymond Chandler’s classic hardboiled
detective story Farewell, My Lovely
that’s too convoluted for it’s own good The
Big Bang is enormous fun but doesn’t make a lick of sense and feels like
one big in-joke for film noir-loving science geeks. No bad thing if you’re a film noir-loving science geek. The plot is a metaphysical cocktail of
quantum theory and classic detective movies like Laura and Kiss
Me Deadly all tied together with string theory.

Banderas makes a suitably cool,
wise-cracking hero, Elliot’s as wacked out as you’d expect a billionaire acid
casualty to be and Delroy Lindo, the always brilliant William Fichtner and
Thomas Kretschmann are good as they play good cop/bad cop/bored cop with
Banderas. Snoop Dogg is as cool as you’d expect playing pornographer Puss
(“Just cum for Chrissakes…”) whose rationale for appearing in his own movies is
to shrug and say “Hitchcock did,” while James
Van Der Beek once again amusingly craps on the beloved memory of Dawson by
playing a drug-fuelled movie star caught in a compromising position with a male
albino dwarf. Best of all is the
sexy Autumn Reeser as motor-mouthed
waitress and science geek Fay who gets the horn from quantum physics and works
at the appropriately named Planck’s Constant Café. Sample dialogue – Cruz: “When do you get off?” Fay: “About 14 minutes after I start
f*cking.”

Cool, funny and almost
unintelligible, you could do worse than watch The Big Bang for Reeser alone.