In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week’s entry: The Big Empty, an indie film about mystery boxes, desert truck stops, and probably some aliens.
In 2003, I enrolled in a summer program at the UNC School of the Arts. It was basically a crash course for high school students who wanted to try their hand at various artistic pursuits; in my case, the film school. Every student got the chance to write, direct, edit, and do all the things you’d expect to do on a film production. By the end, everyone walked away with their own 5-minute short film.
Mine was a short about an unsuspecting man who gets handed a box by a mysterious figure in a duster jacket. He’s told not to open it until instructed, so he takes it home and imagines various scenarios of what lies inside. It was a Twilight Zone-style sketch in miniature, and about a dozen other students came up with similar shorts to varying degrees of success. (I would share that video, but the tape is buried in a box of junk somewhere in my parents’ house, and it probably oughta stay there.)
Later that fall came The Big Empty, a feature film I heard nothing about at the time. But looking at it now, it’s almost exactly the film I was trying to make as a budding high school filmmaker. It’s kind of remarkable how close the premise is, if I’m being honest. I’m not accusing anyone of plagiarism here, though. If a kid in a film school summer camp could come up with this, certainly a struggling Hollywood screenwriter could as well. Take this as merely observing the mind of a young filmmaker at work. It’s a simple exercise in screenwriting: Present a character with a meaningless MacGuffin, tell him it holds some measure of importance, and watch the chaos unfold from there.
In this case, the character is John Person (Favreau), a struggling actor with absolutely no standout features of any kind. When we first meet him he’s comparing his headshots, and decides that a blank sheet of paper with a circle and his name in the middle might work just as well. He’s up to his eyeballs in credit card debt, has a tentative flirtation with Grace (Joey Lauren Adams), the girl across the hall, and is seriously considering leaving Los Angeles1. One night John’s next door neighbor, Neely (Made‘s Bud Cort), gives him a job: Take a blue suitcase to the sleepy desert town of Baker, California and await further instructions from a character known only as The Cowboy.
With the promise of $25,000, John packs up and drives his brown Volkswagen microbus into the desert and stops at a filthy roadside motel2. At the bar next door, John meets bartender Stella (Daryl Hannah), her daughter Ruthie (Rachel Leigh Cook), and Ruthie’s jealous ex Randy (Adam Beach). John really doesn’t want to get wrapped up in any of their bullshit, but Ruthie insists, looking at him like he’s the most interesting thing to wander into town in ages. Randy’s ready to kill John for sleeping with Ruthie, which is when the Cowboy (The Island‘s Sean Bean) finally appears to save John from certain death.
What’s in the suitcase really doesn’t matter, and it matters even less what’s in the bowling ball bag waiting for John in his hotel room. He assumes it’s Neely’s head, after a phone call from Grace informs him that Neely has gone missing. Suddenly we’re in Barton Fink territory, and John Person’s time in the desert becomes an existential search for the life of the mind. Or something like that. The film might have become more interesting if it was about John’s journey to define himself rather than him simply trying to complete a video game fetch quest.
There’s also vague chatter about aliens snaking it’s way through this film. It’s the middle of the California desert between LA and Las Vegas, so of course people are obsessed with aliens. At one point John meets a trucker named Dan (Brent Briscoe) who lays out a whole conspiracy theory about the government funding a bullet train from LA to the East Coast. The purpose, he says, is to keep people from hanging around too long in the desert, because that’s where all the alien abductions occur. “They” don’t want people asking too many questions. In reality, the US government couldn’t care less about funding commuter rail upgrades, let alone a whole-ass bullet train. Even Joe Biden, President Choo-Choo Train, couldn’t get that shit off the ground.
John just wants to hand off the suitcase, make his money, and be on his way, but the longer he hangs around in the desert, the deeper these weirdos drag him into their lives, and suddenly John is deeply invested in whatever might be in that suitcase. To top it all off, an FBI agent by the name of Banks3 (Kelsey Grammer) shows up to question John about Neely’s disappearance. He has John figured out pretty quick, seeing the actor in him, and decides to fuck with him by dishing out a ridiculous monologue about busting his ass, then laughing it off with a pithy joke.
The whole film is the kind of meandering, aimless mess that you write when you don’t know what to write next. The MacGuffin of the suitcase and bowling bag aren’t even particularly interesting, and hardly anyone seems curious about what’s in either one. At one point John buries the bowling bag behind the hotel when he assumes Neely’s head is inside, which is just gonna make more work for himself later, but he doesn’t know that.
If there’s any one failing of The Big Empty, it’s that. The suitcase holds no allure whatsoever. I didn’t particularly care about what was in it, or even why anyone wanted it so badly. It seems to go missing for a large swath of the movie, only to reappear with twenty other suitcases, like they realized too late this was supposed to be an important thing, so let’s double down on it in a hurry.
I kinda feel like I’m being too harsh on this film, but it doesn’t really warrant it. For what it’s worth, it’s a good looking movie. The sweeping vistas of the California desert are captured beautifully, and I will say the whole thing has a nice, moody neo-noir kinda vibe to it. That’s about as far as my compliments on this movie go. It’s just so… Look, the movie’s already called The Big Empty. They did my job for me.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Favreau slots into the “comically generic movie protagonist” really well, honestly. That’s not even a knock on him as an actor. He’s been so good at building his persona as the goofy comic relief that it’s kinda nice to see him play the straight-man again.
He’s also listed as an executive producer on the film, so I’m sure he had a hand in making it all happen. This is only the second film Favreau has produced after Made, and going forward we’ll see him slide into that role more and more.
I don’t have a lot to say on this one because, again, there’s not a whole lot here to begin with. The whole thing feels like an exercise, an experiment. All I can say is I hope they had fun.
FINAL RATING
2.5 stars (out of 5). S’okay.
NEXT TIME: We kick off June with a rom-com hat trick.
- He’s basically Mike from Swingers.
↩︎ - Kinda reminds me of Cuba, Missouri from Dogtown.
↩︎ - Agent Cody Banks also came out in 2003. A coincidence, I’m sure.
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