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| the big bounce
ISLANDERS
Jack (Owen Wilson) has a thing going with Nancy (Sara Foster). Nancy is the mistress of local property developer Ray Ritchie (below, with sidekick Bob Rogers Jr, played by Charlie Sheen in an unsuitable moustache).
“THESE ARE NOT HIGH ROLLERS HERE. THEY’RE GOING
TO STEAL SOME MONEY, CERTAINLY, BUT THEY’RE
NOT RIPPING OFF A CASINO IN LAS VEGAS.
THEY’RE JUST TRYING TO GET INTO SOMEBODY’S SAFE”
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“Winter on the North Shore is like Super Bowl season for surfers,” adds Wilson, who took a few surfing lessons before heading off to the islands, since the character he plays in The Big Bounce, Jack Ryan, is a combination of surfer, slacker, small-time crook and all-out charmer. “I can kind of stand up in the white water. But when I came to Oahu, I mostly indulged my love of surfing by watching from the shore. The waves are so huge on this part of the island!”
Elmore Leonard - the ‘Dickens of Detroit’ - started out writing westerns, but turned to thrillers with The Big Bounce in 1969, and went on to create a distinctive universe in which heroes who are not always the most honest of people get by on their wits in a world which is even less honest than they are. In so doing, he has won a reputation as the Raymond Chandler of his day - or maybe any day. “The great crime writer of our time,” is how the New York Times Book Review described him, adding: “Perhaps ever.”
What Leonard’s heroes lack in honesty, they make up for in morality: they will only ‘take’ someone they think deserves to be taken. In The Big Bounce, this includes local real-estate millionaire Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinise) and his enforcer, Lou Harris, played by British soccer hard man Vinnie Jones. Wilson’s Jack Ryan - no relation to the buttoned-down hero of the Tom Clancy novels - gangs up with Ritchie’s mistress, Nancy Hayes (Foster), to free Ritchie of the burden of $200,000. Lou, meanwhile, is handled in a more straightforward manner, with the help of a Louisville Slugger (which, for non-American readers, is a baseball bat).
Either way, we’re not talking big-league capers. “These are not high rollers here,” says Sinise. “They’re going to steal some money, certainly, but they’re not ripping off a casino in Las Vegas. They’re just trying to get into somebody’s safe.”
The story’s central characters, Jack and Nancy, kind of deserve one another, and neither is under any illusions about the other’s reliability. “Wouldn’t it be great if you were telling the truth,” Jack says to her. “I wonder what that would look like.” Even Ritchie, who ships Nancy off to his hunting lodge every time his wife, Alison (Bebe Neuwirth), totters into town with her very high heels and her even higher blood-alcohol count, is sanguine about her. “You’re a cute kid, Nancy,” he says. “If I had to replace you, it would probably take me most of the day.”
Regular moviegoers will probably be beginning to recognise the world of Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, the three most recent adaptations of Leonard’s 40 thrillers, all but five of which have been either optioned or produced as movies. Freeman’s character in the original novel was a local judge called Walter Majestyk, an earlier draft of a character later played by Charles Bronson in a 1974 movie. Here, he is called Walter Crewes, and he’s still a judge - not that this necessarily means he’s any more honest than the other characters: just a bit more careful.
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