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Partners
Fun with Dick and JaneClaudia PuigThere's really not much fun to be had with Dick and Jane - or anyone else in this anemic comedy. Fun with Dick and Jane has occasional moments of amusement, but mostly it's a poor use of talented lead actors T??a Leoni and Jim Carrey. The details surrounding the premise have been updated from the 1977 original, starring Jane Fonda and George Segal, but it's still a story of a middle-class suburban couple who turn to crime when the husband loses his job. Carrey plays a cheerful guy who gets a promotion to director of communications for a huge corporation, but his dream job turns sour when he finds out the company is going under, thanks to the thievery of its CEO (a wan Alec Baldwin). With hit-you-over-the-head echoes of Enron and other corporate meltdowns, employees are left without severance pay and retirement funds. Everything goes in the fat pockets of the CEO. Baldwin, by the way, has become the go-to guy for slimy corporate roles. Earlier this year, he played a thinly disguised version of Nike chairman Phil Knight in Elizabethtown. Leoni revealed a lot of promise in 1996's low-budget road comedy Flirting with Disaster. We know she's a gifted comic, but her latest roles have kept her from realizing her potential. Remember her wince-inducing yuppie mom in Spanglish? In Dick and Jane, there's a running gag about the couple's young son speaking broken English, thanks to being raised by a Spanish-speaking nanny. It's marginally funny, but the joke becomes tiring. Those sequences, combined with scenes of hard-luck Carrey joining immigrant day laborers to find work, border on being offensive and racist. Surely that was not the intention.
The movie's closing dedication to corporate scandals, including Enron, Tyco, Adelphia and WorldCom, is funny. Too bad the film itself isn't as clever.
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