The Big Bang

Ned Cruz (Antonio Banderas) a PI from LA is tracked down by a Russian boxer who is looking for his missing stripper girlfriend, Lexie, with the kicker being that she also happens to have a hoard of diamonds on her person.

Cruz sets about finding her, and, as he does so, he visits increasingly squalid areas of the city, peopled by equally tacky characters: James van der Beek plays a star with an unpleasant secret, Snoop Dogg is a porn producer who has rather a distasteful penchant for his own movies, and Autumn Reeser is a waitress with a somewhat unlikely preoccupation with particle physics.

Cruz becomes more and more determined to find Lexie, but finding her isn’t exactly a pushover as people die with alarming frequency as he gets nearer his target. Eventually, he tracks her down to Sam Elliot, a billionaire obsessed with trying to recreate the Big Bang. To further add to his problems, Cruz is also being chased by a group of cops (Delroy Lindo, Thomas Krestschmann and William Fichtner) who are also trying to lay their hands on the diamonds.

The film is littered with physics in-jokes to match its Big Bang credentials, such as references to Schrodinger, Planck and Feynman. But sadly, for all its cleverness and nods to the world of quantum physics, this film is a bit of a train wreck.

Banderas is convincing in this role but he is the only actor who brings any grace to a movie which is filmed with a dark and obscure filter to match the unredeemingly seedy world it portrays. It lacks the chilling atmosphere of a classic film noir and instead presents a sort of hallucinogenic version of LA.

I cannot fault the production qualities and the camera work, which keep this thriller with a side order of pseudo physics watchable, even if it will quickly fade in the memory.