Big Nothing

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’.