Big Nothing(2006)

The blackmailing scheme of Charlie (David Schwimmer), Gus (Simon Pegg), and Josie (Alice Eve) against Reverend Smalls (Mitchell Mullen) ends up going horribly awry; we gradually find out that Smalls was earlier killed by his wife, Mrs. Smalls (Mimi Rogers). She had plans to run away with her secret lover, Max (Colin Stinton), along with $2 million of her husband’s money, which he earned through a secret years-long side venture of shooting and selling snuff films.

When Gus goes to the house at 9:00 p.m. to collect the blackmailing money, he gets confronted at gunpoint by Max, who was waiting for Mrs. Smalls to return. Mistaking him for the Reverend, Gus grabs the gun, causing two shots to get fired with one going clean through his thigh, but he is able to knock Max out with a vase before going into the upstairs bathroom to clean his wound. Charlie comes by a short time later after his and Gus’ alibi gets ruined, and after calling out to Gus and getting no reply, he finds the unconscious Max on the floor and Gus’ blood lying around him. Mistaking him for the Reverend as well and also believing that Gus shot and killed him, he calls Josie and leaves a message on her voicemail saying that he and Gus have a real problem at the Reverend’s house. He then takes Max outside and ties a heavy garden gnome on him before dumping him into the septic tank and drowning him. Afterwards, he finds Gus upstairs and gets the full scoop on what really happened, horrifying him, but together they clean up the crime scene and also watch a snippet from a DVD they find of the Reverend’s snuff film work. The sight of it makes Charlie decide to leave and contact the police, but he is surprised at the door by Deputy Garman (William Rosenfeld), who has come by to investigate the gunshots. He tells Charlie about the real Reverend’s death and conducts a short search of the house, but when he attempts to check out the septic tank, Charlie and Gus knock him out and tie him up. 

After all he and Gus have done thus far, Charlie tries to leave again so he can turn himself in, but the moment he steps outside, he comes face-to-face with Mrs. Smalls and her gun. She forces him back inside and makes him and Gus sit down just as Garman regains consciousness, then explains her whole plot to them. After Gus drops vague hints about Max being dead, Mrs. Smalls thinks that they have the $2 million and demands to know where it is, then threatens to kill Garman to try to force them to confess. Thankfully, Josie timely bursts in and puts an axe into her head, seemingly killing her. After Gus explains the whole story to Josie, she looks around and soon finds the money in a gym bag in the oven, but when given the option of taking a share of the money and running away, Charlie refuses it, having no desire to abandon Penny (Natasha McElhone) and Emily (Olivia Peterson). Just then, the still-restrained Garman tries to flee, but they quickly recapture him, and Charlie pockets his badge due to it having come off. Josie then forces a lot of liquor down his throat to get him drunk and tells him that she and Gus will ditch him and Charlie somewhere while they flee for parts unknown, but Garman asks to use the bathroom before they go. While they wait for him, a plane ticket to Las Vegas falls out of Gus’s coat, which Charlie finds, and he punches Gus over it because they had agreed to meet up at noon tomorrow to split the blackmailing money three ways, but clearly Gus planned to take all of the money and run. Gus says that he doesn’t need the money for his daughter’s cornea transplant like he claimed; he owes his ex-wife $300,000, and her lawyer put a restraining order on him where he can’t see his daughter until he pays up, and he hasn’t seen or talked to his girl for two years now. Just then, they hear the toilet break, and they go in and find Garman dead, having broken his skull on the toilet while trying to escape out the window.

Josie then comes up with a plan where they will take Garman’s patrol car and crash it into a tree up the road, then put his and Mrs. Smalls’ bodies in the latter’s car along with her gun and send it over the cliff at Grouse Point. That way, once the cops find the car, they will draw the conclusion that Garman was driving drunk and crashed his car, then flagged down Mrs. Smalls in her car, then took control of the wheel and sent them over the cliff to their deaths. The presence of the gun would give off the impression that she and Garman were having an affair and they did away with the Reverend that night, but then they had their “accident” afterwards. Charlie and Gus put the bodies into suitcases and stick them in the trunk, then after pushing Garman’s car against a tree in a ditch, they begin their journey to Grouse Point.

Along the way, Charlie reels off more random facts and stats, prompting Gus to start yelling at him for it and call him a loser because he knows so much about so many things and yet he went to work at the call center where they met. Charlie explains that he is suffering from a neurological disorder that is causing him to slowly lose his memory, and his mind will become blank in a year or two. This was why he lost his teaching job, and he has been trying to keep his memory working as much as possible in an effort to slow the disorder down. When they stop at a stoplight, Charlie looks at the window of a nearby photo store and sees multiple copies of the photo of the very mother and child Gus keeps in his wallet, and he realizes Gus lied about having a family and attacks him as the car starts moving again. The commotion almost causes the trio to collide with an oncoming car driven by a fat man, and though the man wants to call the police, Gus persuades him not to since no one got hurt. As the trio drive on, Charlie gets Gus to admit that he is a formerly-imprisoned con artist.

When they reach the cliff, they discover that the suitcase containing Mrs. Smalls is missing. It turns out that she was still alive and had managed to get out of the trunk somewhere along the way. As they drive back the way they came to locate her, they get into another argument, and with Josie’s attention diverted, she strikes Mrs. Smalls out of nowhere and officially kills her. As they check her body, Penny and a deputy then appear, and Penny explains to Charlie that they are here to investigate an anonymous call reporting a body in the middle of the road, and she also says that she had to bring Emily along since he wasn’t available to watch her. Josie claims that she struck Mrs. Smalls by accident, and Penny then tries to call Garman for assistance, but she only gets his voicemail. Penny then gets a call saying that “The Eye” from the FBI that was called in to take a look at the Oregon Undertaker murder cases has arrived at the station, so she orders Charlie, Gus, and Josie to come with her so she can take their statements.

While they wait, Penny introduces them to “The Eye”, Agent Hymes (Jon Polito), who turns out to be the fat man they earlier encountered. Penny tells Charlie to watch Emily and has Gus and Josie follow her and Hymes to the morgue to examine Mrs. Smalls’ body, and Hymes comes to believe that the Oregon Undertaker killed her. Charlie tends to the sleeping Emily and puts his coat on her, and after Penny tells him that she will be taking Emily home, he departs with Gus and Josie, who tell him that they still have to get rid of Garman’s body. As Penny is about to pick up Emily, she moves Charlie’s coat off of her, and Garman’s badge falls onto the floor. Though Penny believes that Charlie did something to Garman, all she does about it is stop at a bridge on the way home and drop the badge into the river below it.

The trio go to an old train yard intending to sink both the car and Garman’s body into a large tar pit there, but then a gun-toting Hymes surprises them, intending to take them in. He calls out Gus for making jokes about his weight in their first meeting and then strikes him twice, knocking him on his butt, and Charlie tells him that there is $2 million in a bag in the car and he can have it. As Hymes is distracted with this, Gus snatches one of Hymes’ insulin needles from his coat pocket and jams it into his foot, making him throw his gun into the air and enable Charlie to catch it. Hymes then informs Charlie and Gus that he has just realized that Josie is another serial killer called the Wyoming Widow, whose M.O. is to seduce guys into having sex with her before offering them a flask of whiskey poisoned with highly concentrated thallium, and she always keeps the flask on her person and swears he felt one inside of her coat pocket back at the station. Josie scoffs at this and tries to tell the guys that he is just trying to mess with them, but having now grown suspicious, Charlie tells her to empty her pockets, and she produces a flask. He and Gus then tell her to take a drink from it, so she does, but then she starts gagging. However, she soon reveals it to all be a joke, apparently confirming that Hymes’ story was false, but then they notice Hymes managed to get away while she was pranking them. They all go looking for him in the nearby warehouses, but Gus soon sneaks away and gets the bag of money from the car. When he tries to hide it in one of the warehouses, Hymes confronts him and relieves him of his gun, then tells him he is taking the money out of being dissatisfied with his job and its lack of rewards. He then shoots and kills Gus, but when he enters his car with the bag, Josie pops up in the back seat and holds him up.

Charlie catches up with Josie soon after, and they make Hymes consume a large lollipop Josie had been licking on until he dies from diabetic shock. Charlie remarks on what monsters they have become and throws his gun away, then says that they need to put his body in the car along with the bodies of Garman and Gus (whom they had recovered) and then sink it all. However, she replies that there is one passenger missing, and then points her gun at him before taking out a second flask and confirming that she IS the Wyoming Widow. She gives Charlie the choice of either drinking the spiked whiskey or getting shot since she can’t risk him reporting her, and Charlie opts for the former. However, before he drinks it down, he tells her to not spend all of the money in one place. Confused, Josie opens the bag and discovers that it contains nothing but Emily’s stuffed animals, and Charlie dies with a smile while she goes berserk. In the morning, the camera goes inside Charlie’s house, and we hear the answering machine picking up a call from a man who runs the Seattle branch of a publishing company, who says that he wants to make Charlie an offer on his book (his first ever). Meanwhile, Emily is shown drawing on a few $100 bills in her room, and we see that the $2 million is in there with her; Charlie had switched the contents of the bags back at the police station.

Josie is next seen outside of town trying to hitch a ride, and an elderly trucker picks her up. Before they go, he exits the vehicle to “double-check something”, and Josie readies her flask. However, the old man is then shown covering up a bloody leg in the truck’s bed, revealing him as the Oregon Undertaker. He then gets back in the truck and drives off with her.