There are very few sensations quite as uncomfortable as seeing a great director fall from grace to the point where one needs to wonder what they were actually thinking when making a particular film. It’s even worse when this served as the director’s final film, since they didn’t get the opportunity to end their career on a high note. There’s a reason why most devotees of John Cassavetes consider Love Streams to be his swan song – it’s a quiet, intimate drama that bears all the director’s most notable qualities, while feeling like he was bidding farewell to the medium. However, it’s unfortunate that he found time after this to replace Andrew Bergman as the director of Big Trouble, a film so awful, one needs to question whether Cassavetes was in the right frame of mind when he agreed to take the reigns of what was already a cursed production. It’s fascinating that he started his career as a director-for-hire, helming studio dramas like Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting, as a way of funding his more personal projects, only to end his career in the exact same position. It’s almost poetic that Cassavetes’ professional life would come full-circle in such a way – but this trivial detail is unfortunately far more interesting as anything contained in Big Trouble, a film that seems to be extracted from all the worst recesses of humanity, thrown together into a dizzying blend of frenzied performances, poor storytelling and direction that seems so far removed from anything the filmmaker made before, that we feel second-hand embarrassment that he agreed to have his name attached to this absolutely dire, and perhaps even outright revolting, film that barely even earns that description.

The problems with Big Trouble are mercifully not contained within Cassavetes’ direction, since there is only a finite amount of work one can do to elevate an already dismal screenplay. Cassavetes, taking on the screenplay written by Warren Bogle (who in turn also replaced the original screenwriter), didn’t have much leeway to elevate the material, and seemed to simply resort to facilitating whatever misguided madness that was contained on the page, in the hopes of it working out. The director was very smart to disown this film, remarking on the appropriate title, since his own experiences guiding it to the screen seem to be reflected throughout. Big Trouble is not the work of an untalented director, but rather a product of someone who simply did not care. Throughout the film, there were moments where I could imagine Cassavetes, seated behind the camera, grimacing at what was happening in front of it – it’s a torturous experience that bears very little merit, and the director was fully aware of this. The premise is absurd enough already, but it gradually collapses onto itself, each new scene taking us to a new level of despair, since it seemed impossible that a studio comedy could not only be this uninteresting, but also so deeply tasteless. There are several moments when the film goes beyond the pale in terms of exploring the dynamic between these characters, it traverses the very boundary between decency and morality – and while many comedies have achieved such a risky approach, Big Trouble is far too self-involved to have even an iota of introspection, going for the low-hanging fruit with a fervency we don’t see very often. One would think someone along the way would bring these problems up, but it seems like everyone involved was more eager to finish the film and move on, rather than dwell on it.

The most notable issues with Big Trouble come in the fact that it does have a decent premise, or at least one that is good enough to at least justify being turned into a halfway interesting film. The problem is that it never once approaches anything resembling a good film – it outright stole the premise of Double Indemnity (and believed that asking permission from the original studio would only justify their theft – interestingly enough, part of the bargaining process to get the copyright holders to agree to let this film go forward was that they would in turn receive the rights to Back to the Future, one of the most genuinely insane and imbalanced agreements in Hollywood corporate history), and turned it into the flaccid, unfunny comedy. The industry is built on remakes, ripoffs and sequels, and somehow Big Trouble manages to accidentally be each one of them, reflecting the problems with them all, as well as pointing to the inherent flaws of the dominance of film studios, that genuinely and wholeheartedly believed that placing major stars in a mainstream comedy, with a prestigious director attached at the helm, would appeal to all audiences, who will flock en masse to see this film. Unfortunately, this disconnect from reality can only take a film to a certain point before it actually needs to provide something of value – and standings as one of the vapidest comedies of the era, Big Trouble is nothing but an empty experience, 90 minutes of bloated self-indulgence and retreading nearly every cliché known to the genre at the time. It doesn’t know what it wants to be, where it intends to go, or even possessing something close to an admirable quality, which is one of the countless ways this film goes horribly wrong, not only never amounting to anything of value, but somehow managing to subtract from the viewer’s experience overall, which is a rare achievement normally reserved for the most unlikable films.

The film not only wastes the time and efforts of its director, but also the talents of its stars. By all accounts, a film led by Alan Arkin and Peter Falk (two of the finest actors of their generation) should’ve been at least worth watching, especially considering Falk had given arguably his best film performances under the direction of Cassavetes, and Arkin was an actor who made some daring choices throughout his career. Unfortunately, they’re just as lost in the chaos as everyone else, to the point where it’s painful to watch, since like the director, both actors clearly knew they were involved in something absolutely dismal, and frequently seem to be attempting to pull themselves out of the carnage, but to very little avail. There’s only so much an actor can do to rise above the material, and neither one of them seem to overcome the insurmountable challenges presented to them through these unlikable, heightened characters that bear very little (if any) resemblance to real human beings, being grotesque versions of what someone who had been secluded from society for decades might imagine defines a person. The tendency towards creating a film composed entirely out of little more than cardboard-cutout archetypes, is one of the fundamental flaws of this film, since the premise was already derivative, so the inability to harness the talents of its actors by placing them in meaningful roles just forces Big Trouble to become even worse than it already is. A film can be acceptably scatterbrained if there are interesting characters that anchor it down – but this is not a piece of filmmaking that gives too much thought to how it comes across, functioning as an aimless and unfunny ordeal that is only barely notable purely through the clear attempts of the actors to rise above the material.

 If there was ever a shining example of a soulless film, Big Trouble certainly could be a solid candidate, since it’s rare to find a film have so much potential in theory, but yet fails to live up to absolutely any of it. The film is tasteless, unfunny and derivative – but more than anything else, it commits one of the cardinal sins of comedy – it’s absolutely boring. It never amounts to anything other than a bland, frantic comedy that lacks any spark or soul, and instead just propels itself along by virtue of the reputation of those involved, rather than touching on anything particularly meaningful on its own. The only person who truly suffers from this film’s failure is Cassavetes – for Arkin and Falk, this was just a blip on their otherwise prolific careers. The director was instead known for being notoriously selective, mostly making intimate passion projects and being very selective towards the films that bore his name, at least in terms of direction. It’s a stain on his career, and one that’s made even worse considering this was his final film. If anything, it’s the best-case scenario that Big Trouble seems so atypical for the director, since it’s easier to divorce this work of scattershot comedy from his more personal projects, as opposed to the director investing his heart and soul into this production (as he was known to do with most of his other films), and having it fail so dismally. It’s not entirely clear who this film was made for – it’s a massive departure for the director, lower-tier work for the two actors, and it can’t even make a legitimate claim as being a classic 1980s comedy, since there’s a myriad of better and funnier comedies. If anything, the only value Big Trouble has is as a point of conversation, rather than a piece of entertainment in its own right.