Elmore Leonard Month: The Big Bounce (2004) What the Hell Did We Just Watch?!

This week we continue Elmore Leonard month by going from one of the best adaptations of his work last week in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight to one of the worst—a sentiment which might carry over into all of film history. It’s 2004’s The Big Bounce.

Directed by George Armitage, and written by Sebastian Gutierrez (with some help from Leonard himself), this heist film set in Hawaii has a terrific cast consisting of Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinise, Sara Foster, Movie Throwdown favorite Vinnie Jones, and more. But with a lot of cooks in the kitchen behind the camera it turned into an incoherent mess that makes little to no sense. Upon seeing it Elmore Leonard said he was responsible for two of the worst films ever made, both from the same book that he wrote (a previous version was made in 1969 starring Ryan O’Neal). We do our best to make sense of it all in this episode.

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To find out where to watch The Big Bounce, search for them on JustWatch.

And if you’d like to log as you go you can find everything we discuss this month on our Letterboxd list page here.

Still to come during Elmore Leonard month:

Stick
Get Shorty and Be Cool

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