The Big Kahuna starts promising but falls into a didactic tailspin from which it never recovers. The setup - three business men, all in a different life stage, is elegant and sparse, and allows the three characters to develop fully. By the end of the movie, we are fed a desperate moral theory that "regret builds character" along with (I kid you not) several minutes of voice-over aphorisms. What happened? Instead of sending the movie into where it should have gone, namely ambiguity as to a) what matters to the characters, b) what is at stake, c) what wisdom can possibly be recovered from the mess that the characters get themselves into, we are instead led to a basement of philosophical knickknacks. Failing a reasonable ending, it would at least have been nice to see the characters grow... or perhaps engage in some entertaining pyrotechnics. On the plus side we get to hear grown men say they love each other, so not all is lost...the dream recounting is also well planned & executed.
Review of The Big Kahuna
