“You know how many actors in LA want to be in an Elmore Leonard project?” asked Morgan Freeman on a recent episode of HBO “First Look,” one of those cable shows where the studios pimp their upcoming releases. I can’t answer that one, but I do know that since Leonard began publishing fiction 53 years ago, 20 of his 37 novels have been adapted for the movies or television. His stock in Hollywood really exploded in 1995, when Barry Sonnenfeld turned his hood-in-Hollywood comedy Get Shorty into a hit John Travolta vehicle. Two years later Quentin Tarantino adapted Rum Punch for his impressive Jackie Brown, and Steven Soderbergh scored again in 1998 with Out of Sight.
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It’s a shame, because The Big Bounce—Leonard’s very first crime novel—is a sweet little noir with a sharper sense of cinema than the movie. Leonard began it in 1966, after a decade publishing westerns and a five-year break during which he’d supported his family writing industrial films and grade-school documentaries. Trying his hand at a new genre, he set the story in the present and close to his hometown of Detroit: his protagonist, a poor city kid named Jack Ryan, has washed out as a pro baseball player and drifted into a part-time career as a burglar. Working as a handyman at a small beach resort on Lake Saint Clair, Jack falls under the spell of a teenage femme fatale with plans for a big heist, while his tough but kindly boss, Walter Majestyk, offers him friendship and tries to straighten him out. Like most great noirs, the story is fueled by money, and Leonard’s famously simple prose never prevents him from digging deep into the young thief as he ponders the tin paradise of middle-class morality.
The filmmakers probably weren’t inclined to open with the hero fracturing a Mexican’s skull, which is legitimate. But in addition to correcting the story’s politics, he’s transplanted it from gritty Detroit to the north shore of Oahu—the film opens on a Hawaiian paradise of surfers and manicured beaches. (“This movie has gotten in the way of a really great vacation,” said Charlie Sheen on the HBO show, “and I’m pissed.”) Jack, shorn of an unhappy childhood in a poverty-stricken family, is now an easygoing surfer dude played by Owen Wilson. After he’s released from jail for beaning his crew boss (Vinnie Jones), he accepts a job keeping up a handful of beachfront vacation cottages owned by the district judge (played by Freeman, a casting coup that neatly reverses the racial polarity of the book’s opening).
In the movie Jack and Nancy spy on Walter as he sits in his Hawaiian bungalow watching, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the Chicago cable-access dance program “Chic-A-Go-Go.” Equally mysterious is the new ending, which I’m about to give away (I think). Nancy talks Jack into ripping off $200,000 from a safe in Ritchie’s beach house, but in truth Jack is being set up for the murder of Ritchie (Gary Sinise) by Nancy, Ray’s drunken wife (Bebe Neuwirth), and the wife’s lover—Walter. None of this makes much sense, and it inverts the relationship between Jack and Walter. But it squares with the filmmakers’ desire to make a caper film, a crime subgenre that celebrates theft and stresses glamour over social realism. For Armitage this means epic waves, chicks in bikinis, snarky bongo-and-sax music, and a ludicrous climax that leaves Jack sitting in a limo with a woman on one arm and a bag of cash on the other. After reading the story Leonard had in mind, the only thing I really like about the movie is that it spoiled Charlie Sheen’s vacation.
Directed by George Armitage
Written by Sebastian Gutierrez
With Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Sara Foster, Charlie Sheen, Gary Sinise, Bebe Neuwirth, and Vinnie Jones.
