Synopsis
NED CRUZ (Antonio Banderas) is having a bad day. He’s taken quite a beating, and he’s being held in the custody of three tough, chiseled cops, FRIZER (Thomas Kretschmann), SKERES (Delroy Lindo), and POLEY (William Fichtner). They tell him his sight will return in time for him to look the judge in the eye at his sentencing for the murder of five people.
It all started when a new client walked through his door. ANTON “THE PRO” PROTOPOV (Robert Maillet), a massive Russian boxer freshly released from prison, wants Cruz to help him find a girl, LEXI PERSIMMON (Sienna Guillory). She wrote to Anton in prison, but there’s no one at her return address. The big guy won’t take no for an answer.
Five years earlier, An L.A. mobster paid Anton thirty million in uncut diamonds to take a dive. The fight was brutal; Anton beat his opponent nearly to death before a phantom punch sent him to the canvas. The mobster came after the gigantic brawler, Anton killed him, and wound up in prison. Anton’s been released because a Vegas hitman now claims he killed the mobster. So Anton’s a free man, and instead of going after the diamonds, he wants to find his prison pen pal.
Lexi proves to be as elusive as she is beautiful, and Cruz becomes obsessed with finding her. The investigation takes him into every corner of the L.A. underworld, and Cruz finds himself in the middle of a wild brawl at a strip club. But every lead is a dead end, and everyone he talks to ends up dead, including PUSS (Snoop Dogg), the owner of the strip club, which explains why the cops are after him. Or does it? Cruz knows that Frizer, Skeres, and Poley were the arresting officers in Anton’s murder case. They’re after the diamonds. Cruz figures that Anton got Lexi to stash them, so if he finds her, he’ll find the diamonds and get the cops off his back. He traces Anton’s letters to San Celeritas, New Mexico, and takes the opportunity to leave L.A. behind, if only for a little while.
Once again, he’s met with dead ends. On the upside, he meets FAY NEMAN (Autumn Reeser), a sexy waitress at Planck’s Café, and has a good time with her. And then one night while he’s sleeping, he’s abducted and taken to SIMON KESTRAL (Sam Elliott), an aging hippie surfer who has hired an introverted physicist named NIELS GECK to help him find the God Particle, the origin of life itself. Cruz wonders what any of this has to do with the diamonds or with Lexi, but then he meets Simon’s gorgeous trophy wife, JULIE, and the truth clicks into place.
THE BIG BANG is a true original, a fast-paced, action-packed thriller with witty dialogue, unique and colorful characters with hidden agendas, and twists that will have audiences guessing until the very end. In Ned Cruz, iconic screen legend Antonio Banderas brings to life a detective as smart as he is tough, who in his search for a missing stripper, goes up against crooked cops, a brawling prizefighter, and, quite possibly, the end of the world as we know it.