There's nothing so tedious as an unfunny comedy.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
It's a good thing Tim Allen has Santa Claus to fall back on because any more pictures like this one and he'd be in BIG trouble.
It's not that 2002's "Big Trouble" is a terrible movie per se, but it's not a Tim Allen movie. In fact, it's more like an anti-Tim Allen movie. He's in it and he's the star, but you'd hardly know it by the amount of screen time he has and the number of unfunny lines he's given. This movie is probably no worse than his previous film, "Joe Somebody," and it has a better cast, but it's even less funny and there's far less of Allen in it. There's nothing so tedious as an unfunny comedy.
Adapted from Dave Barry's comic novel, scripted by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, "Big Trouble" attempts to be something of a parody of "Pulp Fiction," presenting an assortment of bizarre characters in what amounts to a series of short, eccentric vignettes. Eventually, all the characters come together for a madcap finale, but not before they've bored us to tears.
Tim Allen plays the same sad-sack loser he's been playing in most of his movies, this time a newspaper writer, Eliot Arnold, whose boss has just fired him, whose wife has just left him, and whose son, Matt (Ben Foster), has just insulted him. Unlike Allen's other movie roles, however, here he gets literally nothing humorous to say or do. For Allen, the movie might as well have been a serious drama. Well, OK, maybe it was.
So, what's it about? About eighty-five minutes is the best I can tell you. What little farcical plot there is deals with a menagerie of unlikable people. The first characters are a pair of hit men, Henry (Dennis Farina) and Leonard (Jack Kehler), who are hired to kill a creep named Arthur Herk (Stanley Tucci), who's been stealing from his employers. Herk's wife, Anna (Rene Russo), hates him for being unfaithful; his daughter, Jenny (Zooey Deschanel), hates him for being a creep; and his maid, Nina (Sofia Vergara), hates him for lusting after her. The audience hates him for same reasons; he's a totally obnoxious person.
Then, there are Snake (Tom Sizemore) and Eddie (Johnny Knoxville), a couple of dodo-brain ex-cons who stick up a bar, expecting spare change, and make off with an atomic bomb. Huh? Well, see, the bar is actually a front for a Russian arms dealer, and the bumbling ex-cons think they're getting away with...I don't know what. And Matt, Eliot's son, and Jenny, Arthur's daughter, strike up a friendship after Matt tries to kill her with a squirt gun. And Officer Monica Romero (Janeane Garofalo) and her dim-witted partner, Walter Kramitz (Patrick Warburton), chase after Matt and wind up getting held hostage by Snake and Eddie. And during the chaos Eliot and Anna fall for one another. And a fellow named Puggy (Jason Lee), a homeless guy who lives in a tree in the Herk's garden, falls in love with the maid, Nina, and winds up in the trunk of Snake's car. And the FBI get involved. And a toad shows up. And a plane gets hijacked. You getting all this?
One of the film's premises is that the hit men are supposed to be the most normal people in the story. The scriptwriters might have taken a lesson or two from those beer commercials on football games and at least tried to write a funny line now and then instead of attempting to force-feed us ludicrous situations.
Cultural references are tossed around with abandon, never to any purpose. The little Geo automobile gets its fair share of abuse; Martha Stewart jokes abound; and poor Tim Allen is eventually lost in the confusion. When he is on the screen, as I've said he hasn't a single funny thing to say or do. He simply huffs and puffs around, looking lost. The rest of the wonderfully comedic cast is equally wasted. Everything, including the pacing, falls flat. Not even the gags about lax security at an airport are funny since 9-11, nor is the potential blowing up of an airplane.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]10636[/release]