Big Trouble

Scramble together polite hit men, smart-ass teens, a corrupt businessman, dumb ex-cons, a wacked-out hippie, scruffy Russian arms dealers, goofy cops, a journalist-turned-adman, some goats and a psychedelic toad, add a nuclear device that looks like a garbage disposal, cook in the Miami sun and voilà: Hilarity ensues. At least, that seems to have been the notion driving this adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry's debut novel, which he locates firmly in the "the bunch of South Florida wackos genre" defined by Carl Hiasson, Charles Willeford and Laurence Shames. But the laughs are few and far between. Once a popular newspaper columnist and happ...