The Big Kahuna

Kevin Spacey is making a career out of depicting losers who are disillusioned with their careers. On screen with American Beauty, on stage with The Iceman Cometh, on both with Hurlyburly, he's the model of arch desperation.

The persona strains a little in stage director John Swanbeck's screen debut, an adaptation by screenwriter Robert Rueff of his own play Hospitality Suite. Spacey plays Larry, sales representative for an industrial-lubricant firm (just the first indication of Kahuna's tendency to lay it on a bit thick) who along with his associates, old pal Phil (a surprisingly sedate Danny DeVito) and neophyte Bob (Peter Facinelli), is attending a business convention in Wichita in hopes of landing a big account, the "Kahuna" of the title. Basically three guys in bad suits in a tacky hotel room talking, the film puts the burden on the actors, who carry it with varying grace. Spacey is impeccably venomous as the cynical, brutally honest Larry; as one of the film's producers, he gets all the best lines. DeVito shows depth as the despairing Phil, and Facinelli is fittingly callow as the newcomer whose innocence conceals a more sinister bill of goods. Despite a few ambiguous quirks -- is Larry coming on to Bob? why does Phil dream of God in a closet? -- Kahuna comes off as an exercise combining The Company of Men with Waiting for Guffman but without the bracing misanthropy of the former or the goofy pathos of the latter.

-- Peter Keough