|
The trouble: It's just not funny
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
Patrick Warburton, Tim Allen, Ben Foster, Rene Russo and Zooey Deschanel are all tied up in a scene from Big Trouble. One wonders if this is how the audience feels during this lame screen adaptation of Dave Barry’s book. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 4, 2002
The release of Big Trouble, a would-be comedy based on a Dave Barry novel that includes a plot line about a bomb on a passenger jet, was delayed after Sept. 11. Maybe that delay should have been permanent.
|
 |
Barry Sonnenfeld's Big Trouble was supposed to be released six months ago but was postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks due to its final 30 minutes, when a nuclear bomb gets smuggled onto a passenger jet.
The sequence isn't amusing now, and it's a sobering thought that anyone ever believed it to be funny. We see a quartet of highly suspicious characters bribe an airline agent to sell tickets to four "John Smiths," security X-rays of the bomb ignored, a baggage handler paid to overlook the oversized case housing the apparatus, a gun sneaked past metal detectors and a midair scuffle among passengers.
Did we really feel so invincible before Sept. 11 that we could have considered these actions hilarious? If so, was that an example of letting down our guard that terrorists took advantage of? Nobody will claim that Big Trouble caused a national tragedy, but the way it trivializes a situation we now know can be deadly serious casts a pall on whatever comedy was established before.
But Big Trouble lived up to its title long before Sept. 11. This is a remarkably convoluted movie for only 80 minutes of action, based on novelist Dave Barry's sideswipe observations about crime, class divisions and Florida's particular brand of freakishness. On the page, Barry's passing remarks about bungled elections, beach-bar bums and Florida Gators fans are funny. Depicted on screen, they're strained attempts at humor. Everybody in the movie looks like they're having a better time than the audience.
None of the characters is developed even to the point of needing to know their names. They're merely props for Sonnenfeld's cockeyed vision, no different or deeper than Carrot Top's shtick.
Tim Allen, current holder of the title "box office poison," stars as Eliot Arnold, a former Miami Herald columnist like Barry, whose new gig as an advertising consultant isn't working out. Neither is his personal life after a divorce, with a son named Matt (Ben Foster) who thinks he's a nerd. Matt's schoolyard game of water-gun "assassinations" coincides with a genuine attempt to murder underworld kingpin Arthur Herk (Stanley Tucci). Why? Because it's maddeningly convenient.
Arthur's dissatisfied wife, Anna, has eyes for Eliot, but there's no time for romance beyond a slapstick tumble. A couple of cops (Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton) are sniffing around, a pair of barflies (Tom Arnold, Johnny Knoxville) get their grubby hands on the bomb hidden by Russian gunrunners, and two hit men are still after Arthur, who's hallucinating from Bufo toad venom. FBI agents (Omar Epps, Heavy D) join the chase while a homeless, Fritos-munching derelict (Jason Lee) watches from the sidelines.
Having too many characters cripples Big Trouble before that unfortunate third act kicks in. It's a movie of fleeting pleasures, captured by Sonnenfeld in freeze-frames while Eliot narrates Barry's wittier remarks. The film's Miami setting and dumb tough guys are reminders of Sonnenfeld's best film, Get Shorty, but this time the audience gets shortchanged.
Big Trouble
- Grade: D
- Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
- Cast: Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Janeane Garofalo, Dennis Farina, Jason Lee, Tom Sizemore, Stanley Tucci, Patrick Warburton, Johnny Knoxville, Omar Epps, Heavy D
- Screenplay: Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone, based on the novel by Dave Barry
- Rating: PG-13; profanity, sexual situations, violence, crude humor, brief nudity
- Running time: 85 min.
Back to Weekend
© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
|
