He's an overly-confident war vet with a scarily violent temper who's ultimately a push-over when it comes to his ex-wife asking him to babysit her dog. It doesn't help that the filmmakers supply The Dude with assistance by his best friend Walter Sobchak, played to perfection by John Goodman. What he discovers, of course, is a perverse, dysfunctional society with dissenting daughters (Julianne Moore), pornography kingpins (Ben Gazzara), and brown-nosing assistants (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). A kidnapping conspiracy draws him in deeper into this grim world of the privileged class where the people think themselves ironically superior to The Dude's laidback, devil-may-care demeanor. When confronting the actual Lebowski (David Huddleston) the other two dolts were looking for and hoping for some kind of reparation, The Dude finds a publicly-revered, physically impaired millionaire with a young trophy-wife aptly named Bunny (Tara Reid). He's the complete opposite of tough-as-nails Phillip Marlowe, which is where the majority of the humor arises - a pacifist at heart who staggers accidentally onto clue after clue pointing him to the real culprit in this surreal mystery.

The result is a hysterical ball of confusion where The Dude becomes an unwitting participant in a kidnapping and embezzlement scheme involving a colorful array of characters which he would have never met under normal circumstances. In The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers take the suspense of the mistaken-identity plot, throw in a big dose of film-noir intrigue, and mix it with kilos of stoner comedy goodness. All this on the same week as the league semifinals against the flamboyantly loud Jesus (John Turturro).

Calling himself 'The Dude,' an unemployed Los Angeles hippie slacker with a passion for bowling, Bridges is laugh-out-loud hilarious as the poor schmuck who finds himself tangled in a sordid, twisted, and utterly bizarre Raymond Chandler plot full of pornography, Nihilists, cut-off pinky-toes, and white Russians. Jeff Bridges plays the offended victim looking for some kind of reparation after two goons confuse him for someone else. Oh what a tangled web you weave when all you want is compensation for someone urinating on the rug that really brought the room together.

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