The Movie: During the opening credits of The Big Kahuna, it states that it's based on a play. It's a play about a piece of the life of three corporate salesmen. Two well worn and jaded professionals, and one fresh-faced, eager to please up and comer. Through the stress of trying to land a huge new account, we end up learning a lot about life in the corporate world in general, and also about these three men as individuals.

The characters (as you'd expect from a good stage play) are well developed, detailed and interesting. The three main actors (Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Peter Facinelli) turn in some phenomenal performances. The story is engaging. So why did this turn out to be a terrible movie?

Some time in the mid-late 20th century, somebody, somewhere decided that everything on film and TV needed to look exactly like real life. Offices look like real offices, down the last detail. Kitchens looked like real kitchens, down to the last detail. Everything looks and behaves the way they do in real life. Meanwhile, around the same century, live theater was moving away from trying to necessarily make everything look like real life. It just wasn't practical when you wanted to have stories that took place in multiple locations. They improvised. They got imaginitive, and they got themselves, and the audience away from the idea that what's on stage needed to look like real life.

People didn't need to see an actual office or a hotel room down to the last detail to know that the scene takes place in an office or a hotel room. It didn't really matter when it came down to what was really at the heart of the story. Stagings of plays became exciting and unique, and the visual look of the sets and lighting, rather than striving to achieve realism, were instead designed to help further the emotional content of the story being told.

So getting back to why this is a terrible movie -- this is essentially a recording of a terrible staging of a wonderful play. It took the potentially boring, static nature of plays (generally being limited to the number of locations you can use since you can only fit so much stuff backstage) and mated it with a set and lighting design that by and large tried to stick as true to realism as it possibly could. The worst of both worlds, if you will.

Film is its own medium, with its own advantages and its own limitations. Live theater is also its own medium, with its own advantages and limitations. Unfortunately this film seems to present the story with all of the limitations of both formats, and none of the advantages of either. I think the filmmakers could have done more to convey the meaty emotional content of the story using some devices that are unique to film, and that doing so would have made a better film in the end.

And good lord, did they really have to use that cheesy Baz Luhrman "Sunscreen" song at the end? It's as if they couldn't get enough emotional or sentimental oomph carried through their staging of the play so they had to rely on some cheeseball song as a crutch...

But what do I know, I'm just a theater dropout :)

The DVD: This DVD offers an anamorphic widescreen video transfer that, though mainly functional, does have noticeable dust and scratches, and a bit of excessive edge enhancement which besides causing "ringing" in some shots, also accentuates the natural graininess of the film.

The soundtrack, though offered in Dolby Digital 5.1, proved to have a somewhat muffled tone which made dialog difficult to understand at times... not a good thing when the entire piece is based around dialog!

I don't think there were any special features other than a trailer on this disc. So yeah. I wouldn't really bother with this one. Really.