SEE Dick flop.
“Fun With Dick & Jane” casts a wildly mugging Jim Carrey and a mostly bored Téa Leoni adrift in a lame and shrill remake of a 1977 social satire with Jane Fonda and George Segal that wasn’t all that great to begin with.
At least the original was vaguely connected to reality, as we watched Segal and Fonda as desperate yuppies – before the term was coined. After he’s laid off from his job as an aerospace executive, they collect unemployment, go on food stamps and eventually turn to robbery to support their extravagant suburban lifestyle.
The story has been updated to 2000, and Carrey’s Dick has just been promoted to head spin doctor by the sleazy CEO of an Enron-like conglomerate (Alec Baldwin in a role far better played by Ed McMahon, of all people, in the original).
During a TV appearance, Dick does a miserable job of explaining reports that the CEO is siphoning off the company’s assets.
The company’s stock tanks, Dick and thousands of other people are thrown out of work – and the CEO walks away with a golden parachute.
This movie borrows the best joke from the original – Dick and Jane’s lawn is repossessed – but adds a stupid scene where Dick steals other people’s sod to replace it, a good example of how the material has been dumbed down for
contemporary tastes and Carrey’s frantic comic style.
Dick lines up for menial work with undocumented aliens and is deported to Mexico; this is intercut with another cringingly unfunny episode where Jane is paid to test a Botox-like substance that leaves her temporarily disfigured.
Director Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest”) overly indulges Carrey’s grimaces and slapstick pratfalls, which are initially funny but soon border on self-parody and frequently bring the proceedings to a crashing halt.
Leoni, a fine comedienne with a gift for physical comedy who has made some awful choices in movies, rarely has a chance to nudge her camera-hugging co-star (with whom she has no chemistry anyway) out of the limelight.
Speaking of corporate malfeasance, “Fun with Dick & Jane” cost a disgraceful $100 million – approximately 33 times the price tag of the 1976 original.
This is the last of a series of overpriced, mindless bombs greenlighted this year by Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal, including “XXX: State of the Union,” “Bewitched,” “Stealth,” “Zathura,” “Rent,” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
If this keeps up, Pascal will no doubt be obliged to trigger her own golden parachute – but how many Sony employees will be laid off to pay for clueless extravagances like “Fun with Dick & Jane”?
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FUN WITH DICK & JANE
[Zero stars]
As much fun as a root canal. Running time: 167 minutes. Rated PG-13 (mild profanity, sexual suggestiveness and drug references). At the E-Walk, the Orpheum, the Battery Park City, others.