15, 85 mins
Big Nothing is a vintage black farce about a trio of double-crossing misfits who fumble a small-town scam. Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s film is so smart and cynical about the futility of wringing another original twist out of the Coen Brothers’ school of horror that you idly wonder why he bothered to shoot this at all.
He clearly expects the audience to groan at the sight of David Schwimmer as a failing father who is married to a calm female cop (Natascha McElhone). We do. And we hate their cute and needy child. The temptation to turn an easy buck by blackmailing the local minister about his visits to under-age internet porn sites is designed to swing us back on Schwimmer’s side. The attempt fails miserably when he inadvertently drowns the man of the cloth in his septic tank.
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His dodgy new friends, Gus (Simon Pegg), and his ravishing apprentice, Josie (Alice Eve), are entirely unperturbed by this setback. Josie buries an axe in the cleric’s wife’s head and accidentally discovers $2 million in a bag in the oven. The plot then proceeds to wander off in order to murder anything remotely sensible within 20 square miles — a remarkably short list, as the gang lurches from one ludicrous back-stabbing stand-off to the next.
There’s a certain morbid pleasure — admittedly slight — to be had from this shameless film. But I doubt there will be many souls in the stalls to share the privilege.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER