Com a Vida em Jogo

With a deliberately sparse-pulpy title, THE BIG TOWN is set during the 1950's... 1957 to be exact... and Dillon really looks the part, a kind of throwback B&W-suited actor even in this neo noir's neon green and pink tinged color scheme, playing a young lucky dice player who miraculously hits the right numbers each and every time, giving the movie a sort of unintentional TWILIGHT ZONE science-fiction vibe, or something delving into fantasy...

And for a vehicle so otherwise grounded and somewhat cliche, predictable and even mainstream, that's alright since Matt's urgency (and the film's suspense) doesn't rely on winning but surviving the pool of gambling hoodlum sharks who, from Tommy Lee Jones as an underground backroom dealer to a mysterious backstory Tom Skerritt, are out to (or seem out to) stop the endless and bizarre winning streak...

The best scenes are during the first half when, starting with having been discovered and weened by local gambling mechanic Don Francks, everything is breezy and easy since all the characters are developed as much as can be (including an expository introducing-the-city David Marshall Green) - not always through dialogue but their sly manipulation to the sport of gambling, and thinking on their toes...

Yet THE BIG TOWN is mostly known for being the third and final film Dillon starred alongside his RUMBLE FISH ingenue Diane Lane, which began most famously with THE OUTSIDERS, the only one they're not romantically involved... although her character finds his scoundrel rebel wild and attractive ("I might fall in love with him")...

Much more grown up in looks and attitude, and seeming far more both an aesthetic and genre-period connection to Francis Ford Coppola's uninspired THE COTTON CLUB than the S. E. Hinton adaptations, Lane provides a sexy, borderline sinister Femme Fatale as Jones's stripper trophy girl...

Without the usual 11th hour gunfire, her danger exists on who she's cheating on while Matt could be throwing away the perfect girl in Suzy Amis -- proving twenty-nine years after the demise of the Crime Genre that Film Noir good girls always have to weather hell before getting what they deserve, and getting who deserves them...

A slow middle's made up for during the finale where Dillon must succeed with slightly more odds added on -- very similar to the more lightweight early-60's-set-comedy, THE FLAMINGO KID, in which he had to win everything with the skill of the game -- cards there, and craps here...

In either game, be it skill or chance... which is chance here pretending to merit skill... Matt Dillon, a minimalist actor to begin with, has the kind of poker face expressions that helps the suspense build without a lot of action...

He's an actor that's been in a some good, great and downright terrible films, but he's usually good no matter. Even when he seems a bit slow to the punch and lethargic, like happens on occasion here, or too streetwise and stubborn to stretch beyond particular tough guy roles, he's got range within limitations...

In BIG TOWN, it's a steady gaze across a long green table. And hell, maybe he'd have worked in COLOR OF MONEY if that other Outsider backed out.

How do you rate a movie like this, which will never be great, but realizes tolerably, pretty well, a genre shuffle? The genre we might call neo-noir, but perhaps neo-B is better. There is the various filler--jazz, night alley with gleaming wet pavement, lots of bars, a fight club, street jammed with clubs, a elevated train that sparks when the guy and the girl kiss. And neo-filler--more than one woman doing a striptease with feathers and pasties and a bit of French stuff in bed. 1987 pretending to be the 1950s--mom with a little hat coming from church, shiny suits, homely red car. Someplace pretending to be "Chicago," da Big Town. A dice game a smart guy can pretty much always win, even when it's played in many scenes.

And Matt Dillon who's really into it, skinny guy always focused, doing a fine job. A "kid" who can be older, Tintin in a strip club. But it ain't "Drugstore Cowboy."

Matt Dillon plays a hayseed crap shooter with unbeatable luck who, in late 1950s Chicago, joins a Windy City syndicate and falls hard for the femme fatale wife of an unscrupulous gambling boss. Despite some errors in casting this otherwise familiar urban crime story is, at least in presentation, a lot smarter than it may first appear. The relative youth of the two leads is fatally inconsistent with the very grown up crime and passion scenario, but director Ben Bolt wisely underplays the neo-Noir mood by refusing to rely on the trendy smoke-and-strobe-light pyrotechnics so common in modern thrillers. The gritty urban setting is instead recreated in all its cheap romantic glamour, and the script has its arcane gambling slang down pat, but the film is something of an anachronism in today's over-hyped market: a competent (if minor) drama, made thirty years too late.

I was attracted to this movie when I looked at cast list, but after I watched it I must admit that I felt a bit disappointed. The main problem of this movie is that actors aren't capable of holding this movie on their back. Why? Because of bad script. Although Dillon, Lane and Jones try very hard to take this movie on another level, there is no innovative storytelling and the direction is too ordinary. So for Matt Dillon fans this is watchable movie, just like for admirers of beautiful Diane Lane. Legendary Tommy Lee Jones is always great but this is not movie for him; far below his level. So if you get hooked up by this great cast watch it but don't expect anything big or extraordinary. The only thing that you'll remember about this flick is Diane Lane scenes; rest of it is very forgettable.

"The Big Town" tells of a small town man (Dillon) with a knack for shooting craps who goes to Chicago to seek his fortune. The film has an excellent cast and all of the story elements required to make a good film. However, tv director Bolt doesn't manage to accomplish that goal as the film is sorely lacking in style, artistry, cohesion, and vision. Instead we see talented performers mechanically going from set to set resulting in an ordinary film product which is flawed, full of incongruities, and not equal to the sum of its parts. An okay watch for Dillon fans now on cable.