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Big Nothing (2006)

Director: Jean-Baptiste Andrea

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Synopsis

Unemployed school teacher Charlie Wood (David Schwimmer) meets scammer Guy Dickinson (Simon Pegg), who convinces him to take part in a seemingly straight-forward con. The plan, to blackmail a priest whose name appears on the company database of visitors to an illegal porn sites, doesn’t play out as easily as either man had hoped.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Notable for its pairing of sitcom ex-pats Simon Pegg and David Schwimmer, ‘Big Nothing’ sees them as call-centre drones, opting to improve their lot by blackmailing a priest with an abnormal fondness for young children. Their foolproof plan deteriorates to the point where double and triple crossings become commonplace and a raft of supplementary characters are hauled in to make up for some shoddy plotting. Throughout, there’s the feeling that director Jean-Baptiste Andrea has thrown everything in his modest arsenal at the screen (animated cut-aways, bargain bin one-liners) and what remains is a screwball revision of Sam Raimi’s ‘A Simple Plan’, which hobbles blindly through a minefield of genres with foolish, split-screen abandon. Pegg – that bastion of reserved English comedy – puts on a rasping American accent that’s more New York Jew than Midwestern huckster, but he’s still the best thing in the film by some way. Schwimmer attempts a similar kind of reinvention, merely consisting of him constantly saying ‘fuck’.

Author: David Jenkins 2006-11-28 11:53:45

Time Out London Issue 1893: November 29-December 6 2006