The Big Bang | Film review - Raymond Chandler meets Stephen Hawking in a flashy film noir thriller | Movie Talk | What's on TV

Raymond Chandler meets Stephen Hawking in flashy film noir thriller The Big Bang, a bizarre mash-up of private-eye sleuthing and subatomic physics in which smart-talking gumshoe Antonio Banderas’s hunt for a missing woman (Sienna Guillory) gets entangled with a scientist’s search for the God particle.

Despite lashings of neon-drenched style and some striking characters, including a lovelorn giant boxer with ‘a right hook like a freight train’ (Robert Maillet) and a reclusive billionaire obsessed with recreating the Big Bang beneath the New Mexico desert (Sam Elliott), the overly talky, flashback-laden movie doesn’t really come off but there’s fun to be had along the way.

Look out for offbeat cameos from rapper Snoop Dogg as a porn mogul and Dawson's Creek’s James Van Der Beek as a sleazy Hollywood star whose albino midget sidekick is clearly only in the story to provide the shaggy-dog punchline, ‘White Dwarf goes supernova’.

Showing on Sky Movies Premiere at 1.45am tonight http://youtube.com/v/HwntbsRIYNs

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A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.