After this painful ripoff of "Murder, My Sweet" (Dick Powell) and "The Falcon Takes Over"(George Sanders) and "Farewell, My Lovely", (Robert Mitchum), Raymond Chandler must be recoiling in his grave. The opening was entirely stolen almost word for word from "Murder, My Sweet"; the blinded Marlowe being questioned, then Marlowe alone in his dark office looking out the window when suddenly he sees this dinosaur aka Moose Malloy reflected in the glass. Then follows the bar and the fight routine. Later Marlowe aka Cruz asks: "How will I find you?" "I'll find you." I was driving my wife crazy quoting lines before the actors could get them out. Okay, the Moose Malloy character was bigger than any before, I'll give them that. But the accents of Cruz and Anton made them almost unintelligible. Subtitles might have helped. They changed Velma to Lexie, but sadly they were nothing alike. Velma was a hard-as-nails fighter while Lexie was the classic stripper with a heart of gold. Starting with that, the plot line began to change slightly, presumably to make it fresher and more up-to-date in this fourth outing of the same story, but none of the changes made the story better by any means. I'm a great Sam Elliot fan. Loved him in "Did you hear about the Morgans?" but in this role I was embarrassed for him. Maybe voice-over commercials don't pay as well as I thought. The cover promised an intense thriller filled with action with, of course, no mention of a tired remake, borrowed from Mr. Chandler without anybody's consent. Half the film involved three detectives casually jawing with Cruz, and it only picked up toward the end in a ridiculously contrived grand finale. Slow and tedious. Instead of asking How did they do it? I'd ask: Why did they do it?
Review of The Big Bang
