April 5, 2002 | Several very talented people are listed in the opening credits of Big Trouble, and there are times when many of them appear determined to turn this fitfully amusing trifle into a full-scale laugh riot through sheer force of will. Unfortunately, this violates one of the cardinal rules of comedy: The audience is never supposed to see you sweat. Even more unfortunately, the valiant efforts are, at best, only sporadically successful.
Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, Get Shorty) is the director, and that alone should prime you to expect something much more consistently and abundantly funny. Of course, if you’re among the many who despised his last film, the ill-starred Wild, Wild West, you might view this new venture as a welcome step along the comeback trail. Still, I doubt that Sonnenfeld will list Big Trouble very high on future resumes. And a few of his actors may prefer that you forget about the movie altogether.
Adapted by screenwriters Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone from a well-regarded novel by humorist Dave Barry, the movie offers a plot that is cleverly constructed, which is not quite the same thing as being ingeniously complex or hilariously farcical.
The opening scenes are overstated and unpromising — Eliot Arnold (Tim Allen), a Miami Herald columnist, is fired after a painfully unfunny blow-up with his boss — and it takes a while for the movie to recover. Meanwhile, the complications accumulate: Eliot yearns to develop a better relationship with his semi-estranged teen-age son, Matt (Ben Foster), who’s much more interested in pursuing a lovely classmate, Jenny (Zooey Deschanel), the stepdaughter of a wealthy but sleazy businessman, Arthur (Stanley Tucci), who’s being stalked by hit men (Dennis Farina, Jack Kehler) hired by Arthur’s even sleazier business partners.
Late one evening, Matt arrives at Jenny’s suburban Miami home, armed with a water pistol, at precisely the same moment that the hit men arrive with far more lethal weaponry. (The water pistol? Don’t worry, it’s not important.) The hit men miss their target and flee, but Matt sticks around long enough to be collared by a couple of mismatched cops (Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton) who contact Eliot, who becomes instantly smitten with Anna (Rene Russo), Arthur’s discontent wife, who….
Whew! Excuse me, I need to catch my breath. OK, I’m ready to start again. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes, the discontent wife…
Anna falls for Eliot, and either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Arthur is making a play for their pretty young maid, Nina (Sofia Vergara), who’s really more attracted to Puggy (Jason Lee), a spacey drifter who has taken up temporary residence in a tree in Arthur’s front yard. Two dim-witted petty crooks (Tom Sizemore, Johnny Knoxville) figure into the mix when they rob a seedy bar that doubles as a front for illegal arms dealers, at precisely the same moment that Arthur is dickering with the proprietors. Some other things happen, followed by still more things, and just about everybody winds up at a Miami airport where security is so lax that people can board a commercial aircraft with a suitcase containing a nuclear weapon.
The last bit of comic business — the stuff about lax airport security and a suitcase-size nuclear weapon — very likely won’t strike you as funny as it might have seemed prior to the events of 9/11. That’s one of the reasons why Big Trouble, originally set to open last fall, only now is reaching the megaplexes. Another reason is a squirm-inducing moment during a conversation between the cop played by Garofalo and two FBI agents (Omar Epps, Dwight “Heavy D” Myers). The cop remarks that, thank God, no one has ever triggered a nuclear weapon within the U.S. The FBI agents exchange a nervous glance, indicating that the cop shouldn’t rush to assumptions.
It’s unfair, of course, to judge a movie in light of events far beyond the control of its makers. (It’s unavoidable, of course, but unfair.) On the other hand, it’s always fair to question why any movie that employs so many funny people winds up being only a fair-to-middling time-killer.
Allen, Garofalo and Warburton give relatively subdued performances that actually serve them, and the movie as a whole, quite well. Farina and Sizemore, crafty and reliable scene-stealers, hit the right notes of seriocomic menace, while Epps and Myers are effectively cast in straight-men parts. But Tucci overplays his character’s sleaziness and strains too obviously for cheap laughs. And Russo appears oddly tentative, as though she never managed to get a handle on her role. The other players are game and resourceful without being especially memorable.
Let’s go back to that security-challenged airport for a fitting analogy: Like an overloaded aircraft, Big Trouble moves forward in fits and starts, but never manages to achieve sufficient momentum for a smooth, satisfying liftoff.
