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Big Trouble

2002, Movie, PG-13, 85 mins

Big Trouble: Review

BIG TROUBLE
starstarstarstar
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 happily married dad, Eliot Arnold (Tim Allen) is divorced, on the outs with his teenaged son, Matt (Ben Foster), and condemned to concocting ad campaigns for cheap clients whose primary concern is models with large breasts. But his troubles really start when Matt borrows his car to "kill" classmate Jenny Herk (Zooey Deschanel) with a squirt gun. Matt arrives at the Herk house just as two real killers (Dennis Farina, Jack Kehler) are about to shoot Jenny's odious stepfather, Arthur (Stanley Tucci), whose demise would make South Florida a friendlier place. Jenny's sexy mom, Anna (Rene Russo), certainly wouldn't miss him, nor would the maid, Nina (Sofia Vergara), whose toes he's been trying to suck, nor the shady business associates from whom he's been embezzling. Chaos ensues, police (Patrick Warburton, Janeane Garofalo) are called and the family dog (drunk on psychedelic toad saliva) noses everyone's crotch. Watching this farrago from a nearby tree is beatific bum Buggy (Jason Lee), who falls for Nina and happens to work at the Jolly Jackal, the dive where Arthur will soon be trying to buy a missile from Russian mobsters who persuade him to accept instead a nuclear bomb in a suitcase. The Jolly Jackal is also where the brain-dead ex-cons (Tom Sizemore, Johnny Knoxville of TV's Jackass) and two very determined FBI agents (Heavy D, Omar Epps) enter the story, which was almost certainly funnier on the page than it is onscreen. Scheduled for release in September 2001, the fact that the film's third act is built around slipshod airport security, a hijacking and air force escort jets with orders to blow a passenger plane out of the sky forced its postponement. But to blame its failure on post-WTC disaster sensibilities is a cop out. It's not the bomb on the plane that scuttles this film: It's the mugging, ham-fisted direction and total absence of comic timing. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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