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December 22, 2005
The problem with Fun With Dick & Jane asserts itself from the very beginning. A title comes up "The Year 2000."
Why?
Apparently this allowed all of this to be pre-Enron, which of course - and if you consider this a spoiler, you are thinking way to hard - ends up being a flat punchline at the end of the film.
Why can't Sony seem to do a remake without destroying the original idea by forcing it into being a meta movie? D&J is less of an overt meta work than Bewitched, but at the core of what the studio development team completely missed about the charm of the original is the fact that beyond the outrageous idea, it wasn't all that clever.
The original idea was simple and to me, very funny. Dick & Jane Harper are upwardly mobile suburbanites, preoccupied with keeping up with the Joneses. Dick gets fired by his boss, who is also a corporate thief, and desperation hits quickly as the Harpers are over their heads in debt. Dick is a bad robber, but Jane has a knack for it and together, they start to make it into a lifestyle. And in the third act, their biggest heist is payback against the evil boss.
The family that thieves together, stays together. Cute. Could get ugly, but doesn't have to. It just has to be a comedy that believes in its own premise… It doesn't need to turn into Munich.
But D&J2K seems to want to say something about the Enron era… but never really does. It wants to say something about the abusive power of financial shows on cable… but its take is too over the top to have any impact. The film cheats at the end and tries to defuse the joy of greed by making the heroes too heroic for a comedy pay off.
And the film seems to get distracted by its own ideas. When Dick ends up looking for work on a corner with a bevy of illegal immigrants, the joke goes wider and wider and wider and it is barely funny enough for the first attempt at humor. The movie jumps from "Dick, you may have to take something lower than V.P." to a job at a pseudo-Wal-Mart. Jane, who gave up a bad job as a travel agent, can't get another bad job… and even in her section, the Joneses element is botched. (What is Angie Harmon doing in this movie? Almost nothing. Same with other familiar movie faces like John Michael Higgins and Jeff Garlin.)
The movie seems to feel it needs to make Dick go insane in order for him to turn thief. Not funny. And not humane. If Dick doesn't take responsibility for his choice, why should we care and as a result, why should we laugh? Isn't the threat of eviction enough? There is a clever them pretty well buried in the movie where we realize that D&J aren't willing to use real guns or deadly force while others are. But the idea is never really confronted.
Then, the final sting is so complicated and so lacking in anything approaching cleverness that the movie just ends flat. Really. They are trying to exchange a piece of paper in a bank lobby. A piece of paper!
And in the very end, wouldn't it have been a lot of fun, if D&J are going to turn into Robin Hoods, to see them enjoying giving away the money in secret innovative ways that matched or surpassed the robberies?
I don't hate Fun With Dick & Jane. It's not really hate-able. And that feel one sometimes has that they just ran out of ideas and let Carrey improvise turns up now and again, but it is not the bane of the film. This one really feels like it lies at the door of the screenplay and the structure for this story. It is almost impossible to know what this film once looked like. You can see the stitches on this Frankenstein of re-shoots and re-edits. But the villagers need not burn it… just ignore it.
(Note: Variety's Peter Bart is an Exec Producer of this film because he was a producer of the original. Conflict of interest? A little. Worth discussing? Not really.)
