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An Exercise In Nonsense

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Suppose a screenwriter is pitching this to a studio exec:"Well, it's about 3 salesmen for an industrial lubricant company, in Wichita for a trade show. 2 of them are middle-aged, rather jaded about their occupation and life in general. The third is a new guy, recently married and graduated from college, who is also a devout Christian. Virtually everything takes place in a hotel hospitality suite they rented to entertain clients, specifically to meet 1 important client ("The Big Kahuna") who, if they could secure his business, could turn their struggling company around. The 3 of them discuss what our purpose is in this life and what it all means"Exec: "So do they have this drunken orgy with strippers and get the young guy loaded and caught in a compromising position with a hooker, just when his newlywed wife arrives, having decided to surprise him on his first business trip?""No. It's just the three of them, talking in hospitality suite"Exec: "Well, how about going another direction. Islamic terrorists seize the hotel and will blow it and everyone in the place to smithereens by midnight, unless $100 million dollars is wired to an off-shore account. The mild-mannered Christian turns out to be an ex-Navy seal who thwarts the plot and kills all the terrorists""Uh, no. They just talk, although the Christian guy does shove one of them into a food tray."Kind of hard to see how this got made, but if you get a pair of actors like Spacey and DeVito for the 2/3 of the cast, maybe you can sell it. The smartest thing writer Roger Rueff and director John Swanbeck did was keeping this to 90 minutes, although it probably could have easily just been a 1hour drama. As a person in marketing and sales I found a lot of this very interesting and perceptive. I can also see how many could find this whole thing tiresome and boring.

A marvellous film covering many different subject areas. It is minimalist as most of it takes place in a hotel suite. It's a business convention where three salesmen (Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Peter Facinelli) are selling a product. In short, they are trying to get a big monetary sales deal going with one client. Only their young cohort (Peter Facinelli) manages to encounter this customer, but the conversation gets side-tracked and the deal never goes through. I won't let you in on the details – but this leads to many an encounter – some of them quite impassioned.There are several areas covered – friendship, the nature of work, youthful and older employees, and religion – all of it in a very real and direct way. For a film with such a broad spectrum of topics bordering on the philosophical, it never becomes pretentious or wordy. The script lifts this film into several intense confrontations. The actors enhance all this - particularly Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito. Their performances are magnetic and really something to behold.

Terrific existential angst study done by two of the best actors working today, Kevin Spacy as desperate Larry and Danny DeVito as worn-out Phil.... long time salesmen buddies hoping to make the one big killer sale that had eluded both of their mediocre careers to date and that would make everything seemingly right again. The location for the film was exactingly placed in a bland hotel in bland Wichita, Kansas, a worthy stand-in metaphor for the nothingness of existence where the great things of life are in very short supply for these two good friends who are impatiently waiting for the fabled company president Dick Fuller to arrive to provide that life saving big sale that would give them new purpose and reason to feel good about themselves again. Who would ever guess that a big order for industrial lubricants could do that? Transferring very intelligent and talky plays to the screen often doesn't work well, but when it does it is magical and deeply involving. It worked so very well here, and intelligently so, as Spacey and DeVito were wonderful playing off each other as salesmen friends so familiar that talk between them was almost like talking to oneself, or at least to one's wife. It was obvious that they loved each other as well as most marrieds do, as much of their dialogue was similar to that of a married couple, and the story's diverse philosophical meanderings that ranged from marketing to religion to love to marriage to character and to, of course, the meaning of life and the real value of shrimp versus cheese ball snacks, were all the more effective due not only to the well crafted script, but also due to the world-weary resignation of the lead characters playing off their near opposite, a wet-behind-the ears, young company research newbie named Bob who was oddly sent with them to the convention. Bob was innocently sincere and mostly good hearted, but at the same time was cocky and smug about things he knew almost nothing about but thought he knew so well. His gently delivered, but harsh and well-earned comeuppance at the end from DeVito's Phil was the one great thing that I knew all along was coming, and I was so glad when it came down hard on this naive, supercilious, and self-righteous member of the fundamental religious right. But sadly, as he dumbly disagreed with his comeuppance details that were so obviously dead on, Bob was not at that time wise enough to know that he had so much more to learn over the years before he could claim possession of any appreciable amount of human character. From this, such familiar feelings were surely evoked in all of us who once happened to be similarly young and naive as Bob is here. And, as it turned out the same way as in much of real life, the "big sale" was not made. Or.... was it? Truly a philosophical thinking person's film and one to be seen again and again for full value.There was a bit of resolve in what served as an epilogue, as it showed that these three ended up pretty much the same as they began, but somewhat tweaked for the better. Hopefully, like we all do.

Following his Oscar win for "American Beauty", Kevin Spacey starred in the semi-cynical "Big Kahuna", about three businessmen (Spacey, Danny DeVito, Peter Facinelli) trapped in a Wichita hotel room expecting an important client. The movie has the distinct feeling of a play, with the single room setting and emphasis on dialog. It's certainly got an interesting plot, with its look at the unpleasantness of life for traveling salesmen. However, aside from the strange similarity to his role in "American Beauty", Kevin Spacey also sort of repeats his role from "Glengarry Glen Ross".But don't get me wrong, I thought that the movie was worth seeing. Not any kind of masterpiece, but OK.