Director: John Swanbeck
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, Peter Facinelli, Paul Dawson

- Reviewed by Robert

It's always tough to put a stage play on the big screen. As one critic said, the cinema is made for external conflicts that you can see, while the stage is made for interpersonal conflicts that take place in the dialogue. So given all that, this movie is a fine play, and the bonus is that it's not exactly terrible as a movie. You just never forget its origins on the stage.

It's got laughs, contradictory characters, Ally-McBeal-like daydream sequences, intense epiphanies about the meaning of life, and clear divisions into three acts—when the camera actually leaves the hospitality suite for a montage of shots around the city as a bow to the cinematic medium.

You can see why Spacey wanted to do this movie so badly. It's a witty, literary, high-brow dramady about three men, twenty-something, forty-ish, and fifty-something, who are representing an industrial lubricants company at a big convention in the flat flat midwest. They're after the president of a major manufacturing company to get him to sign a contract for their lubricants. (A good portion of the dialogue—and the lubricant jokes—concern the lengths to which they should go to secure the man's signature on the contract.) But the two seasoned salesmen keep missing the guy, leaving the youngest, Bob (Facinelli), to make contact. Only one problem: Bob is more interested in selling Jesus than industrial lubricants. It's like Waiting for Godot meets The Apostle.

Sales becomes a model of human relationships, and they explore alternatives to the sales paradigm (marriage, friendship, faith, etc.,) looking for meaning as well as money in their lives. The writer, Roger Rueff, is not afraid to let each man's prejudices and self-justifications stand on their own, which allows us to see both the benefits and drawbacks of faith, friendship, marriage and (of course) sales. It's a fair, balanced dramatization of that angst-filled dilemma, "What am I going to do with my life?" which means it's really more literary and philosophical than dramatic. If you're not already dealing with these issues, you might find yourself less than compelled by the dialogue.

But then again, who isn't dealing with these issues?

The Big Kahuna had a lot of potential, but it felt like Rueff was afraid to deviate too far from his original stageplay. And I found the rip-off of an old internet gag a bit too much at the end. Sure, it's a fine social critique, but couldn't they come up with something original, maybe something that would touch directly on the action of the play, that would bring it down to earth? Me, I like stage plays and philosophy, so I liked it. But it kept reaching for a connection with concrete reality and couldn't quite make it. Maybe if it had used the big screen to tell the big story of these guys' lives outside their hospitality suite, it might have made this film a Big Kahuna indeed.

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