Kathmandu:

The British, as we were musing last week, have a tradition of black humour and they do it extremely well in their plummy accents. It was the English who gave America unashamed dark laughs.

In today’s America it wouldn’t be ‘PC’ or politically correct to chortle at any number of hilarious things that happen in The Big Nothing, a very funny picture which has Simon Pegg (whom we also reviewed last week in Hot Fuzz) as a man desperate to make money.

It was British director Alfred Hitchcock, who allowed America the right to laugh at odd goings on with his movie The Trouble with Harry in which a dead body keeps getting moved around. The Americans developed their own brand of dark humour seen most recently in Bad Santa, The Ice Harvest and other movies with Robert Downey Junior as star.

The Big Nothing is set like The Ice Harvest in a small town in America and the entire cast is trying to figure out ways to get out of the horrible place, taking a lot of money with them. To show us how evil most of the people in Big Nothing are, we are given David Schwimmer as the innocent who is drawn into a blackmail plot that snowballs, twists and turns and has you laughing to the last frame.

Tom Dellard, British critic writes, “Derailed. Failure To Launch. Clearly, 2006 has been a year for films pushing their luck with own-goal titles. Now, taking the biggest risk of all, comes Big Nothing, director Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s follow-up to his promising B-horror debut Dead End. That film owed a debt to David Lynch. This one’s creditors are the Coens and Tarantino. From Joel and Ethan, we get another wintry spin on Fargo’s small-town-schmuck-in-screwed-up-scam scenario. From QT, Andrea rips one style beat after another, whether it’s a  Point of View (POV) shot from an open trunk or Kill Billesque ‘toon inserts.

That this comic thriller hangs together, despite being derivative and over-directed, is thanks to its interesting cast and a snowballing script, crammed full of incident and throwing up more reversals than a driving test. As bumbling wiseguy Gus, Pegg may not have completely nailed his first American accent, but he compensates with the usual comic smarts, made to feel at home with a series of Spaced grabs (red pill/blue pill Matrix riff and, again, the ‘toon inserts). Then there’s Josie, played by Brit thesp Eve, a relative newcomer injecting some fresh-faced sass into the spiralling chaos, as identities switch, accidents multiply and one guest star enters only to exit moments later with an axe in the bonce.

The real star though, and the film’s sympathetic centre, is Schwimmer. Only the churlish — or those far too familiar with Friends to allow the actor to move on — can now accuse him of being one-note. Yes, he’s whiny and bumbling, but there’s a vulnerability and genuine desire to do good for his family. And while having fewer of his randomly spurted ‘factoids’ (titbits about anything and everything) might have made room for Jon Polito’s speccy oddball or lady cop Natascha McElhone, there’s a tragedy lurking behind Charlie that gives this otherwise lightweight film a gravitas among the giggles and gore. An imitation of other indie noirs it may be, but Big Nothing is one film that offers more than its title suggests.”