The Big Nothing
Never was a title more horribly appropriate. Only changing the first word to “small” could improve its accuracy. David Schwimmer, Simon Pegg and Alice Eve (from Starter for Ten) are uncomfortably yoked together for this uniquely trying and tedious comedy-thriller-farce, notionally set in a third-hand Fargo-ish United States of quirky cops and wacky criminal schemes.
Schwimmer plays a bitter, unemployed scientist married to the world’s most beautiful and unlikely police officer, Natasha McElhone. He accepts a demeaning job in a software call centre; his co-worker (Pegg) confides that he has a list of all the customers who have visited porn sites and he wants to blackmail them.
Pegg’s ex-girlfriend (Eve) gets in on the act and everything turns to chaos. It’s not funny, it’s not thrilling, it’s not anything and it’s especially painful to see that formidable actor Mimi Rogers roped into this uninteresting silliness, although she does have one funny line about Pink Floyd. As for Pegg, without a decent script he can’t show the comedy style he displayed in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. — Peter Bradshaw