Big Nothing (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

David Schwimmer, still trying to determine if there's a life without Friends, plays an ordinary Joe who gets in deep when he joins felonious forces with a ferrety chancer (Simon Pegg) and a rapacious teen princess (Alice Eve). Once their blackmailing scheme goes awry, the film begins to see-saw madly between farce and manic noir, a cocktail the Coen brothers patented and then spawned a great many imitators. Writer-director Jean-Baptiste Andrea simply doesn't have the comic nerve or timing to carry it off, and the look of his film is horribly drab - little wonder when most of it was shot in the Isle of Man and Wales, neither of them a convincing stand-in for Oregon. Schwimmer and Pegg are both likeable performers but they're on a hiding to nothing, big or otherwise.