[year/rating] 2002 PG-13 [genre] Comedy [director] Barry Sonnenfeld [starring] Tim Allen Rene Russo Patrick Warburton Jason Lee

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These people are in big trouble

Summary Capsule

Miamian Eliot Arnold has runs in with FBI agents, mob hit-men, moron terrorists and a pretty woman all to impress his son.

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Andie's Rating: Dave Barry is the funniest man alive.
Andie's Review: So I read Big Trouble a few years ago because it was a work of fiction by one of my favorite authors, Dave Barry. This man is one of my personal heroes. His columns are hysterical and his books usually make me wet my pants from laughing so hard. In high school one of my teachers, Mr. Schmidt, actually banned me from bringing Dave Barry books to class because my trying-to-keep-from-laughing-too-much-and-only-succeeding-in-making-a-weird-snort-like-giggle noise was disrupting the class. Well, long story short (too late) I have been anticipating the release of this movie forever. I loved the book and I loved the people cast in it and I was pumped. And then the release got postponed by the Sept. 11th attacks since the plot involves a bomb on an airplane and would-be terrorists. (I really don't think people would've been offended if this had been released last fall because the terrorists are played by Tom Sizemore and Johnny Knoxville, for crying out loud. But I digress...)

"This man is one of my personal heroes. His columns are hysterical and his books usually make me wet my pants from laughing so hard."

So this movie finally got released and I rented it the other night and was definitely not disappointed. They stuck to the book rather faithfully and the cast was hilarious. The sheer plot of this is way too complex to get into. There are real shootings, squirt-gun shootings, missle purchasings, plane hijackings, goats on the freeway, and a psychedelic toad. It's outrageous and totally funny. I plead with you to read the book and then see the movie. Neither one of them will let you down.

Usually I am not the biggest Tim Allen fan. I liked his stand-up, but that was about it. He is the perfect choice for bumbling free-lance advertising man Eliot Arnold. His son is played by Ben Foster, who I have been in love with since his days in Flash Forward on the Disney Channel. His sarcasm is great and is only enhanced by the dry wit of Zooey Deschanel playing his love interest Anna Herk. The great casting choices just go on from here. We've got Stanley Tucci, Jason Lee, Johnny Knoxville, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton, Heavy D, Omar Epps and Andy Richter. It is a smorgesboard of funny people who have a good script to play off of.

The funniest thing about the movie (for me anyway) is when the house full of people gets held hostage and Eliot is all alone in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do and so he's looking for a weapon and he picks up a rolling pin. Then the guys from outside are like, "We've got a potential Die Hard situation developing in the kitchen." Any reference to one of my favorite 80s movies is always a good laugh for me.

Go check out Big Trouble, it's worth the 1 1/2 hours of viewing time because it'll keep you laughing all the way through. And if you read or have read the book, tell me what you thought. I also have to make a plug here for Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs because it is, hands down, the funniest thing I have ever read in my entire life.

Justin's Rating: The Tick still lives!
Justin's Review: Most comedies -- most, not all -- are reliant on one or two "funny" characters who play off of all 298 other "straight men" characters in the cast. This results in a situation where your basket is very full of eggs, and you haven't hardboiled them yet. Sometimes, it turns out okay. Sometimes, you have to carry the metaphor into something involving making omolettes by smashing every egg. But a much better approach, at least in this ignorant movie-watcher's opinion, is to have the 298 people be funny and the other 2 be serious. More comedians = more comedy... is that a faulty equation?

"Yet I, just a man but a man of passion, say that you should NEVER forget about a film that has a fat evil toad squirting hallucinogenic poison into the eyes of a dog that sniffs everyone's crotch."

Big Trouble, for better or worse, takes the ensemble approach to the eccentric comedy that it is. It's stacked with character actors and comedians who clearly love playing these bit parts to the hilt. It works because the weaker performances are balanced with the stronger ones, and no one horrible actor monopolizes screen time. Instead we get Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton, Jason Lee, Andy Richter, DJ Qualls, Stanley Tucci, and Johnny Knoxville, all living it up.

This is one of those films that's kinda hard to sum up, mostly because it has about five plot lines that intersect at various times. Tim "Gnome Improvement" Allen is a down-on-his-luck ad man who meets the woman of his dreams (Rene "I was pregnant and still kicked butt" Russo) when his kid tries to shoot her daughter... with a super soaker. Unfortunately, Russo is married to a jerk who embezzled money, and is being hunted down by two hitmen from New Jersey. There's also a couple Russian weapons dealers, two odd cops, a guy who lives in a tree (with the terrific name of Puggy), a sensual latina maid, and some goats. To explain it all simply: This is Miami.

More specifically, this is Dave Barry's Miami. As one of the best humor writers -- ever -- Barry took the leap from non-fiction essays to one goofy novel, and it made my day. His book Big Trouble had one focus, to make you laugh, and it did this from cover to cover. I was dying to see how the big screen translation would turn out (particularly because this is the first comedy novel-to-film translation I know about, except save The Princess Bride), whether it would be Hollywood doctored to death or left alone. The answer lies somewhere in the happy middle. It keeps a lot of the narration (voiced by Tim Allen) to explain the brief backstories, and includes a couple new lines... but about 80% of what you see on screen is from the book, line-for-line. And that, my friends, is a very good thing.

Big Trouble had the misfortune of being scheduled to release near September 2001, and got bumped to a later date due to part of the plot involving a nuclear bomb on a plane. Like Donnie Darko, it got buried at the box office in its new date, and was largely forgotten. Yet I, just a man but a man of passion, say that you should NEVER forget about a film that has a fat evil toad squirting hallucinogenic poison into the eyes of a dog that sniffs everyone's crotch. I'm just that kinda guy.

Coming from a book, a number of the lines are (shall I say) smarter and wittier than you'd normally get in a film. You might not be busting a gut constantly, but there's such subtle humor woven into this thing that you'd really have to be dense not to pick up on the fact that jokes are flying by your head left and right. Of particular joy are Warburton and Garofalo as the dumb and exasperated cops, respectively. Warburton has that sort of knuckle-headed thickness here that he brought to the short-lived TV show The Tick, and Garofalo... well, when has she not rocked? Come to think about it, she was in Mystery Men as a humorous superhero too... connection anyone?

Is this a comedy that is worth courting you for your time, like some sort of sweaty, desperate 17-year-old just trying to get a goodnight kiss? Sure, why not? Pucker up, buster, because it's worth the shame.

Drew's Rating: Please forgive me, Dave...
Drew's Review: It’s generally been my experience that there are two types of people I should make a point of never, ever publicly disagreeing with: cute blondes, and Italian guys bigger than me. So you can see my dilemma here. But I gotta be me, and here's the straight scoop: Big Trouble just ain't all that and a bag of chips.

"See, the genius of Barry's umpteen zillion books is that he writes in the kind of natural, inelegant, deceptively simple style that at first glance SEEMS like the sort of thing anybody could do… but good luck being half as hilarious."

Having said that, though, I feel the need to elaborate. This is not, by any means, a BAD movie. On the contrary, it's a pretty funny one that, under other circumstances, I probably would've returned to the video store with a smile on my face and a positive, if not glowing, endorsement. But like all highly enlightened people, I'm a huge Dave Barry fan, and thus had already read the book this film is based on. And in that context, it pains me to say that... well, it kinda dropped the ball.

Ironically, the giant gobs of narration are actually one of the best (and funniest) aspects of the movie, taken as they are almost verbatim from the novel. See, the genius of Barry's umpteen zillion books is that he writes in the kind of natural, inelegant, deceptively simple style that at first glance SEEMS like the sort of thing anybody could do… but good luck being half as hilarious. Unfortunately, that's my main problem with the film — while it sticks fairly close to the source material, it turns out that without Barry's distinct touch, the situations that'll make you bust a gut laughing in the novel are just kinda smile-worthy in the movie. For instance, the scene where Matt, Puggy, Roger, the NJ hitmen (whoo whoo!), and the police converge on the Herk household and each other had me giggling like a schoolgirl on nitrous oxide the first time I read it, but on film it was just "Enh… yeah, that's pretty funny. I guess." The pacing was good, but somehow it just wasn't the same.

Which is not to say there aren't good points to the movie as well. As with any film based on a book, you're always going to be comparing the big-screen portrayal with what you'd pictured in your head, and in that regard Big Trouble (mostly) succeeds with me. Patrick "No molesté!" Warburton was put on this earth to play The Tick, but his casting as Officer Kramitz is almost equally inspired. (He's also the subject of one of the few book-to-movie changes I really liked, with Kramitz actually making it to the airport, only to be strip-searched and chased naked through the terminal. Priceless.) And while I'm not the world's biggest Janeane Garofalo fan, her Officer Romero is just the right mix of disbelief and weary resignation. I'll be honest, if there's any actor I thought would be less of a match for the mild-mannered, nerdy Eliot than loud, boisterous Toolman Tim Allen, I can't think of him, but Allen defies expectations and makes me buy him as a good-humored but beaten-down everyman.

But then there's Rene Russo, whose Anna Herk just does NOT do it for me. And it's not entirely her fault — I know they had to make cuts in the movie, and she can't help it that they left out most of the gentle, tentative flirting between Eliot and Anna before the action starts — but when she jumps him in his office, she just seems like a skanky teenager, rather than a vulnerable but strong woman who's just found her soulmate. (The absolutely-not-found-in-nature hair color doesn't really help either.) Seriously, the chemistry between her and Allen is zero, and her concern over her daughter late in the film just didn't strike me as very convincing; Jenny's kidnapping (and Snake’s reason for doing it) is supposed to be the point where the story shifts from funny to funny/serious, but whether that was a stylistic choice on the director's part or Russo's fault, I didn't feel any real sense of danger. Ditto for the part, late in the movie, when Eliot tries to ambush Snake and get the nuke off the plane, though that's more the soundtrack's fault; whose idea was it to have manic, really goofy, “two-lines-away-from-the-top-on-Tetris”-style music playing during the most dramatic scene of the film, anyway?

So, bottom line, would I recommend this movie? Well... yeah. But cautiously, and with a definite proviso that you not make the same mistake I did — watch the film, THEN read the book, to maximize your enjoyment of both. Trust me.

Oh yeah, and Elizabeth Dole is funnier than Martha Stewart. Totally.

Evolution takes a step sideways. "Where's gate 13? WHERE'S GATE 13?" Dumb and Dumber's kissing cousins Didja Notice? [some sources: IMDb] The Gators fans on the radio through-out the film and then the mob hit-men plane passengers at the end. Funny funny funny. Ugly Fish, Good Beer Pelican bombers, yes! Heavy narration territory here Martha Stewart... NOOOOOOOOO! This guy likes toes WAY too much That toad is way gross, and that dog is way funny Moms can be very vicious when defending their daughters against super soaker attacks That dog with his nose in Janeane's crotch... can the world get any better? The Seminal Fluids... great name for a band That father-son car chat was fun-ny Puggy has good hair for someone that doesn't bathe DJ Qualls has naughty eyes Why are all hit men so polite? The guys watching aerobics at the bar, all the time Don't drop the bomb... The FBI dresses very well these days Empty the squirt gun before trying to use it as a fake pistol The hitmen commentary is precious In the book, the male cop is handcuffed to the shelf unit; in the movie, it's the female cop Is there anything more surreal than Martha Stewart's face on a dog, barking at you? Gator fans are kinda dumb Puggy likes Fritos At the airport, you can hear the overhead speaker start talking about the yellow humvee that the FBI guys left outside The F-15s are flying with their landing gear down Those goats crack me up, every time The airport security gag would be funnier if it weren’t so believable. Is It Worth Staying Through End Credits? Not really. Intermission! [some sources: IMDb] I (Drew) love how in Barry's world, there's really only 4 places in the U.S. — Miami, New York, Washington D.C., and New Jersey. Seriously, read his books and try to find somebody who's NOT from one of those 4 areas. Replace Washington with Philly and Miami with the Michigan/Ohio region and you've pretty much got my life in a nutshell. Katie Holmes originally signed on to play Jenny Herk. Director Barry Sonnenfeld voice-only cameo as a Gators fan on a radio sports show. Tim Allen's character is largely based on Dave Barry (i.e. profession, newspaper he works for, etc.). Arthur Herk pictures Martha Stewart when he hallucinates. In the book, he saw Elizabeth Dole. Patrick Warburton, who plays Officer Walter Kramitz, played in "Dave's World", a 1993 sitcom based around writer/journalist Dave Barry, who wrote the book on which this movie was based. He was Dave's neighbor Eric. Groovy Quotes Puggy: My name's Puggy, and I live in a tree. I hope I didn't ruin anything for you. Matt: Can we borrow the stupid Geo tonight? Andrew and me have to kill a girl. Eliot: Andrew and *I* have to kill a girl. Eliot: The Hurks did have a dog. His name was Roger, and he was the random result of generations of hasty unplanned dog sex. Eliot: Can I offer you some coffee? Anna: Sure. Anna: Well, it's more of a dare than an offer. Guard #1: We're not supposed to carry guns. Guard #2: We're not supposed to drink on the job, either. [takes a drink] [repeated line]: Was that a goat? All the old people on the plane: GET THE SUITCASE OFF THE PLANE! Arthur: Nina, this is my house, you work for me, and I want to suck your toes. Eliot: Do you think someone's trying to kill your husband? Anna: God, I hope so. Henry: Moron #2 just got Moron #1 all wet. Geo Salesman: Sweet little vehicle. Just get divorced? Ah, it doesn't matter. Forty-two miles to the gallon, AM/FM radio. I'll even throw in the undercoating. Anything else you'd like to know? Matt: Yeah. How many clowns can it hold? Eliot: Arthur Herk. One of the few Floridians who was NOT confused when he voted for Pat Buchanan. Matt: Uh, Jenny's mom opened the door, and I came running up to squirt her. And then, uh, Mrs. Herk jumped me... or jumped ON me. And, uh, and then I went down on Jenny... or I f-fell on Jenny. Eddie: Okay, we gotta pick a road. Arrivals or departures? We're arriving, but... the we're departing. Which one, Snake? Snake: What do you think? Jenny: I think you guys should turn yourselves in and plead not guilty by reason of stupidity. Leonard: If I don't shoot someone soon, I'm gonna forget how. Alan: Oh, don't worry, Ivan. It's just your foot. See, this is what we at the bureau call an extremity shot. Generally, the victim survives. They don't do so well with what we call a torso shot. Pat: So what do you think, Ivan? Would you like to experience a torso shot? Henry: We have a potential Die Hard situation developing in the kitchen. Leonard: What's happening? Henry: Well, either he's going to whack 'em with a rolling pin or bake him a cake. I don't know. Could go either way with this crew. Snake: If you try to call the cops after we leave, the next bullet goes through your head. Henry: Well, Miami sucks, but the cops are kinda nice. Lawyer #1: Look, Ace, there isn’t any rule against smoking cigars in this restaurant. Henry: I’m not talking about rules; I’m talking about common courtesy. There isn’t any rule that says I can’t come over here and fart on your entrée. I don’t do it because it’s just not good manners. Lawyer #3: I hope you realize you’ve just committed assault. Henry: I know, I know. [shakes head] Time was you actually had to hit somebody. DVD Review Cool Miami-themed pastel animated menus. Most DVDs have extended versions of the film or extra scenes -- but not Big Trouble. No, the Big Trouble DVD offers you the option of watching the movie in seven and a half minutes, condensing all the important scenes down into a mini-movie that gives you the gist of what went on. Funny idea. If you liked this movie, try these: The Princess Bride Out Of Sight The Truth About Cats And Dogs End Credits This review page was last updated on 8.10.04 MRFH Home . Reviews . Findaflik . Features! . MRFH Forum e-mail Mutant HQ © 2004 Mutant Reviewers From Hell (Original Content). All Rights Reserved.