BIG TROUBLE

Rating: 3

BIG TROUBLE, you might recall, was pulled from its original fall 2001 release because of the incidents of 9/11. The film’s finale features a plane hijacking and a really big bomb. Releasing it then would have been so far beyond wrong that a whole new circle would have had to be added to Hell order to create an appropriately scathing reward for those responsible. More, pulling it was one of the rare and all the more precious instances of Hollywood showing a class and a sensitivity that only makes its lapses all the more glaring and disheartening.  But the less said about FREDDY GOT FINGERED, the better.


Barry Sonnenfeld returns to Miami, scene of his wildy funny GET SHORTY, and the deliciously quirky characters who live there, characters rendered all the more endearing because they just don’t know that, like Miami, they inhabit a reality that isn’t shared with the rest of America, or even the world. Instead of Elmore Leonard, though, Sonnenfeld here takes on Dave Barry. So far so good. Alas, in taking as his leading man Tim Allen, he attempts to drive a square peg into the round hole of Barry’s gestalt, which is to take reality and give it a determined, surreal tweak. Allen’s delivery is gauged for a sit-com laugh track and, worse, his performance is like nothing so much as the downer you’d expect not just from a sit-com, but from the “very special episode” of a sit-com, the one where the characters learn about the evils of alcoholism, homelessness or child abuse. You know, where funny just isn’t the point of the exercise and everyone does his or her best to not lighten the mood. There’s a reason why Lucy never did one.


Then there’s Barry’s tale-telling style, though he does link everything together in a way that makes sense, some things are just better told than seen and the reason I’ve come to that conclusion is the protracted foot-licking sequence featuring Stanely Tucci and a young actress whose name I’ll withhold in the name of protecting the innocent. The sight of Tucci’s generously proportioned tongue lathing every nook and cranny of this hapless woman’s toes inspires a feeling more akin to revulsion than amusement. It’s just disturbing. Same with the dog-psychedelic venom-squirting toad face-offs. The inner life of animals have always been difficult to portray on camera, and these interludes only serve to drive that point home.


Allen’s a divorced columnist turned ad man suffering through the Miami heat and obnoxious clients. Oh, and his son, who lost all respect for him when he bought a GEO. One thing leads to another, as they often do in Miami and before you can say mojito, Allen’s caught up in a hit on gun-runner Tucci, a stolen nuclear bomb that looks like a garbage disposal, and an unlikely romance with Tucci’s trophy wife, an emphatically blonde Rene Russo.


Yet, buried among the dreck are nuggets of wonderfulness and to which we must cling. Top of that list are Sonnenfeld stock company players Dennis Farina, as a hit man who still has time for etiquette and Russo, as a gold-digger with second thoughts. Farina does the suave menace thing like the rest of us draw breath and knows how to spin it for laughs. As for Russo, she gamely dons citrus-colored clothes and hot pink lipstick as she goes for the laughs even in scenes with Allen and all the while shows us how good 40+ can look. Also along for the ride and delivering the laughs are Jason Lee, as the uber-innocent Puggy, who travels to Miami in search of really good corn chips, Tom Sizemore as one half of the stupidest low-lifes on earth, and Jeaneanne Garofalo and Patrick Warburton as cops with attitude, common sense, and dead-on one-liners.


In fact, if the story had been just about these characters, we’d have had something. Maybe the running jokes about Martha Stewart and rampaging goats in downtown Miami would have added up. And with that, BIG TROUBLE commits one of the worst sins in cinema land. It taunts us with the shadows of what it might have been.