Movie Review: Fun with Dick and Jane
Posted by Administrator on December 24th, 2005
Fun with Dick and Jane is a remake of the 1977 comedy
The new version stars Jim Carrey as Dick, who’s an executive at a mega corporation. He gets promoted to vice president of communication just in time for the company’s stock to plummet to next to zero. It is he who has to appear on cable tv to tell the stockholders that they have lost everything.
Jane, his wife, is played by Tea Leoni. Tea is a travel agent, but when Dick gets his big promotion, she decides to resign and does so one the same morning as Dick’s company takes the fall.
Instead of the couple looking at the bright financial future that they were when Dick got his promotion, they are not looking at a bleak existence. They are literally broke. Their savings are gone, their retirement fund is gone and all that they own is being repossessed faster than they can blink their eyes. This includes the lawn. The landscaping company sends men to literally roll up the sod and take it back.
Dick decides that he will find a job and goes out to numerous job interviews, with no success. It seems that all the employers that matter have seen his company’s fall from grace and Dick’s performance on cable tv. No one wants him to work for their company.
Dick and Jane decide to take up a life of crime to allow them to maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. At first the couple takes up petty thievery. Then they get greedy and decide to turn to bigger and better things. That’s when everything goes wrong.
The fall from grace of Dick’s company is very much likened to the fall of Enron. In the first place, Dick’s company was built on the premise of lies. Richard Jenkins and Alec Baldwin do a great job of playing characters who remind the audience of Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay.
The film doesn’t take advantage of opportunities to land Dick and Jane in the center of a political comedy. Instead, there are too many wigs, too much slapstick and too many false beards during the couple’s robbery attempts. Late in the movie, the executive played by Alec Baldwin tries to move his money out of the country. It’s too little and much too late.
Though Fun with Dick and Jane is not a sensation, it may be pleasing to those who haven’t seen the original 1977 version. It’s a mediocre attempt at a remake and I predict it will not make great money at the box office.
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