Are You With Us?: Big Trouble
By Ryan Mazie
February 14, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Quicker than you could say the movie’s title, Disney yanked the film from being released and advertised. No matter which way you cut it, Disney’s choices were to sit on the film for a few years, until the tragedy of the event would start to heal or dump it six months later as a tax write-off. The latter option was selected.
Still, I was interested in the film. The trailer looked funny. I love ensemble casts, and really wanted to see the controversially released ending. With a big cast, a big time director, a big tangle of a plot, and a not so big running time of 85 minutes, the one thing Big Trouble lacks in size is the most important – laughs.
Big Trouble takes place over the course of around two days in the diverse city of Miami, following an eccentric group of intersecting characters. Tim Allen gets the most screen time as Eliot Arnold, a Pulitzer Prize winning ex-Miami Herald columnist (same as Dave Barry) turned failing advertising executive. Eliot’s increasingly pathetic life gets a quick turnaround after a quickie with Anna Herk (Rene Russo), the mother of Jenny (Zooey Deschanel) who is the assigned Super Soaker target to Eliot’s son (Ben Foster), in a high school game called Assassin. Meanwhile, Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler play two real assassins hired to take out Anna’s husband, Arthur (Stanley Tucci), for skimming money from the company where he works. However, what Arthur really loves doing is sucking the toes of his Mexican housemaid (Sofia Vegara) who has a passion for a Frito-loving tree dweller named Puggy (Jason Lee). And this is barely 15 minutes in!
The film is less of a plot but more of an unfolding of events caused by a Domino-effect of increasing absurdity. Then there are also two Russian weapons dealers (remember pre-9/11 where you had to have a thick Russian accent to be a cinematic terrorist?) who front as bar owners (Daniel London and Lars Arentz-Hansen), two idiotic criminals (Tom Sizemore and Johnny Knoxville), and two cops (Janeane Garofalo and Patrick Warburton) who constantly cross paths with all of the characters.
With enough plot points to make a three-hour movie, let alone one with almost a third of that running time, Big Trouble is not as convoluted as one might think. However, it is awfully shallow. While character development is not as important in a comedy as a drama, what we get here are stick figures with one trait, clashing into each other to make funny, extravagant fiascoes (Goats on the highway! Airport chase! A run-for-cover scramble where people keep falling over each other!).
While these debacles featuring the whole ensemble are laugh-out-loud hilarious, the moments in between are deadly silent. The movie never builds up its momentum; something just never clicks, even with all of the noticeable hard work the actors are putting in. But maybe that is the problem itself, it never looks as if the actors are having a terrible amount of fun. Instead, we see comedians trying to pump life into a potentially funny film that just ends up stillborn.
Tim Allen is given the most to do as a “loser dad,” striking up a love affair, trying to be cool for his son, and saving a plane from exploding. Garofalo and Warburton, even though one-note, are enjoyable as they attempt to piece together the madness while causing chaos of their own. Sizemore and Knoxville have some fun quips as the idiot ex-cons, but most of their physical humor misses the mark – surprisingly so for Knoxville, who has made a career out of laughable injuries. And while Deschanel and Foster have enough charm between the two of them to have a movie of their own, here they are unfortunately forced to step aside for the grown-ups.
It is funny how time works. While at the time of release, Allen, Russo, Sizemore, Garofalo, and Warburton were the top stars, the tables have certainly turned. Anyone born in the new millennium would probably say “Russo, who?” Zooey Deschanel ((500) Days of Summer, Yes Man), Johnny Knoxville (Jackass), Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, The Mechanic), Jason Lee (My Name is Earl, Alvin & the Chipmunks), and Sofia Vegara (Modern Family – funniest new comedy on TV as a sidenote), the bottom-billed actors on Big Trouble are now the stars of today. It seems like the only person who was famous when and after the movie came out is Martha Stewart, who has an odd yet hilarious running joke throughout the movie and has her face superimposed on a dog, barking “Arugula!” during a hallucinogenic sequence (if the movie couldn’t get crazy enough). While the movie’s leading cast is certainly not with us today, the film’s humor still carries over to be with us (although I wonder how well the Britney Spears jokes will hold up in another decade from now).
Director Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed two of my favorite films – Get Shorty (because I am an Elmore Leonard fan) and The Addams Family – as well as the more popular Men in Black series, does a great job at connecting the characters, completing all of the story lines (even if he cheats by using an infrequent voiceover), and keeping the confusion of who is doing what to a minimum. With a trademark style of heightened reality, this is probably his less out there version of reality, even though it is still only a notch above normal. Maybe this is why the bomb on the plane sequence, even though a touchy subject (after 9/11, it would have been harmless in the cast and crew’s perspective while filming), it is not entirely offensive due to the ridiculous, slapstick nature it is presented in. Sonnenfeld’s lowest-grossing film, all was forgotten a couple of months later with the release of Men in Black II (his second-highest grossing film). Directing the sugary cute family flick RV in 2006, Sonnenfeld jumped onto the TV ship, abandoning film. However, he found little commercial success on TV, none of his series lasting more than 24 episodes, although he was responsible for the critical darling and one of my favorite shows, Pushing Daisies. Now, Sonnenfeld is back to the big screen, shooting in 3D the next installment of the Men in Black series.
While staying fairly faithful to the book up until the end, which is less dark, the biggest problem would have to be the screenplay written by the duo Matthew Stone and Robert Ramsey. Responsible for some of the biggest “comedy” flops: Man of the House, Soul Men, and Intolerable Cruelty, the duo seems unable to catch a break and have no new films lined-up. The biggest fault is trying to have Puggy (is it only me or is that name horribly annoying?) be the narrator throughout the film. This idea was dropped promptly after the narration during the beginning and never returns until awkwardly at the end. Even at the start Puggy suggests that he might not be the best narrator since he is locked in a trunk for a chunk of the movie. I guess it is nice to see the writers admitting to their mistakes during the movie itself. I figured that this device was used in the book so they kept it, but upon further investigation this was one of the film’s own inventions. While the movie is already brisk, this was another five minutes Sonnenfeld could have beneficially chopped off.
Waiting a little over six months, Disney set Big Trouble for release April 5, 2002. Even then, they felt the film was unreleasable to a wide audience due to its 9/11 content. Dumped into 1,961 theaters with next to no marketing this go-around, Big Trouble earned a small $3.5 million opening weekend, placing ninth. The film quickly dropped out of theaters and by week five was practically on the road to DVD. Winding up with $7.3 million ($9.9 million adjusted) and with an overseas release less than an afterthought, the movie hit DVD with the sole extra of a director’s commentary that October.
Big Trouble does live up to its name in terms of release, but with a fun title like that, there is little laughter to go around. With a satisfying cast, director, and a few good slapstick set-ups (including a great bit between Farina and Kehler, keep finding reasons to hate Miami), Big Trouble isn’t all problems. If anyone deserves a timeout, it would be the writers who do a decent job at adapting the plot of the book, but not the humor. Big Trouble only brings small chuckles.
Verdict: With Us
5 out of 10