Synopsis
Leonard Hoffman is an insurance salesman struggling to make ends meet. The fact that he has triplet sons who all want to go to Yale isn't making things any easier. Blanche Rickey is also worried about money; her husband is a millionaire with a weak heart, and she worries that he'll blow through all his cash before he finally dies. When Blanche meets Leonard, she devises a murderous plan that she claims will fix both their problems.
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Cast
- Alan ArkinLeonard Hoffman
- Beverly D'AngeloBlanche Rickey
- Peter FalkSteve Rickey
- Charles DurningO'Mara
- Robert StackWinslow
- Paul DooleyGeorge Noozel
- Valerie CurtinArlene Hoffman
- Richard LibertiniDr. Lopez
- Steve AltermanPeter Hoffman
- Jerry PavlonMichael Hoffman
Recommendations
- 90
Los Angeles Times
Deliciously funny. - 80
The New York Times
It possesses high points you simply don't find in lesser if more consistently funny movies. - 80
Chicago Reader
It still has several moments—most notably a completely offhanded kidnapping—when Cassavetes's inimitable off rhythms do strange and wonderful things to the conventionally written comedy. Big Trouble is just a footnote in the career of one of America's most innovative, unclassifiable filmmakers, but it's something to see. - 70
The A.V. Club
I went into Big Trouble with exceedingly low expectations and was pleasantly surprised...Much of what makes the film so unexpectedly endearing is that Falk's incorrigible drifter seems motivated less by greed than by a boyish spirit of adventure gone horribly awry. - 50
Time Out
Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash. - 50
Chicago Tribune
These isolated pockets of comic invention are balanced by long stretches of general choppiness in editing and pacing. Shot by shot, the movie is crisply staged and photographed, but the gags don`t work and the timing`s off in much of the aborted fun. - 50
TV Guide Magazine
Director Cassavetes here applies his remarkable talent for social observation in a light-comedy context and creates one of the strangest, and in many ways most frustrating, screen comedies in recent years. - 50
Miami Herald
John Cassavetes has been making exquisitely personal films -- or agonizingly personal ones, depending on one's tastes -- for years now. Sometimes, they are intimate dramas (Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence). Sometimes, they are dark comedies in melodramatic dress (Gloria). And sometimes, as in the newly released Big Trouble, they are just a mess. [19 Apr 1986, p.D1]
