By: Ingril Stobenich

There are certain movies that don’t need special effects and CGI to move you, to remind you that there is a certain beauty in simplicity. The Big Kahuna does just that. Made back in ’99, the film starred Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, and Peter Facinelli. There really aren’t any other characters in the film other than extras; and very quickly, it won’t surprise you that the film was based on a play called Hospitality Suite written by Roger Rueff, who also happened to write the screenplay as well.

It starts off with DeVito playing Phil and Facinelli playing Bob on the sixteenth floor of a hotel suite in Wichita, KS. Spacey, playing Larry, is shown on his way up the elevator to meet his friends. All three of them are marketing reps working for an industrial lubricant company in Wichita visiting for the weekend to attend a trade show which Larry describes as being this anonymous city with no discernable identity. The motivation that drives all three characters is to find the grand benefactor, the one investor that will provide their company to sustain itself for the next few years, which Larry playfully declares as the big kahuna.

Phil, the veteran of the marketing rep business, schools young Bob who is fresh out of research and development, recently married and a devout Baptist, about how to woo a potential investor. It isn’t long until we see that out of the three, Bob certainly does not belong. Phil, having an identity crisis at the end of his career, questioning his ideas about religion and God, reading dirty, gentlemen’s magazines, and chain smoking throughout the entire film is clearly established as the conduit for the film’s eventual and final revelation. And lastly, Larry is poised as the foul-mouthed, though oddly knowledgeable and witty of the three, who verbally flings out acerbic diatribes and insults arbitrarily, and who has an entire vault-full of axioms and aphorisms that confirm his intelligence, somewhat reminiscent of Spacey’s role in American Beauty. Perhaps, the three can best be described as a hybrid of the Three Wise Men and the Three Stooges. They certainly make for an interesting array of characters that take an ordinary concept (i.e. selling some commercial product to an investor) and make into something larger, even transcendental.

Inevitably, Phil, Larry, and Bob become embodiments of certain ideas and ideologies that question the very nature of humanity. That is what makes The Big Kahuna a great movie. It doesn’t have any grand ol’ Michael Bay and James Cameron special effects, but the dialogue and character development—you know, the substantive stuff—makes the film worth watching.

But I’m not here to give the entire film away and all its ideas and dialogue. See it for yourself. While it’s not a movie to watch for spectacle and has probably been underrated for just such a reason; it is definitely one of those movies of the nineties that will remind you how great film and theatre really is and what the two can accomplish beyond mere spectacle.