Fun with Dick and Jane

Cast:

Jim Carrey as Dick Harper

Tea Leoni as Jane Harper

Review:

Dick (Jim Carrey) works for a computer company that crashes to the ground the day he is promoted. With everything he had invested in the company, he finds himself living the American nightmare – 40 years old and suddenly unemployed, and worse, over qualified in a shrinking job market. With his choices increasingly shrinking, Dick and his wife Jane (Tea Leoni) turn to a life a crime to try and get back to the life they knew.

“Fun with Dick and Jane” is an extended Enron joke used to give Jim Carrey plenty of opportunity to mug for the camera. Everything else is more or less perfunctory to that – but Carrey pulls it off. Leoni gets far less time to show her off her own formidable comic timing. There are some nice jokes about the fallout of modern middleclass life – such as the Harper’s son, who has spent more time with the Mexican maid than his overworked parents and has accepted her culture instead of his parents. It’s a bit absurd and too far to go for a small laugh – which sums “Fun with Dick and Jane” pretty succinctly.

As Dick decides to seek revenge against his boss (Alec Baldwin) with his new criminal knowledge, the film makes some statements about the responsibility of employers to their employees – statements that are becoming more and more germane to the middle class as one stumble can suddenly tear everything they’ve worked for from them and leave them with very few options for the future.

Not that it’s actually about more than Jim Carrey’s particular brand of physical comedy – and if you like that, you’ll like “Fun with Dick and Jane”. If not, there’s not much else there.

“Fun with Dick and Jane” is rated PG-13 for brief language, some sexual humor and occasional humorous drug references.

Movie News

Marvel and DC

X