Once again, pinheads rule (5/14/02)
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Big Trouble. [Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002.]
Victimized by a gold-digging exwife, fired by a humorless editor at the Miami Herald, and driven into a humiliating and mortifyingly unprofitable career in freelance advertising that leaves him a craven supplicant to loud obnoxious fat guys who want to sell beer to couch potatoes with photographs of girls with big jugs in bikinis, Dave Barry’s [very plausibly cast] alter ego Tim Allen discovers after much trial and error that the only way he can regain face in the eyes of his mercilessly skeptical and brutally empiricist teenage son is to run down a hijacked jet as it taxis down the tarmac, overpower some large and dangerously aggressive but fortunately dimwitted hijackers, toss the ticking nuclear weapon they stole by mistake from the Russian mob and then inadvertently triggered overboard into the Gulf Stream, and save either Miami or the Bahamas [the geography is a trifle hazy] from incineration, albeit at the cost of frying a few fish.
Thus in consequence he earns the eternal gratitude of a couple of FBI guys — who, perhaps not surprisingly, after flashing their badges and quoting some obscure executive order nobody every seems to have heard of seem authorized to seize property at whim and shoot anyone they feel like — is awarded a pair of autographed cowboy boots from Dubya himself [and, presumably, an authenticated presidential nickname like “Timmy Boy”, though mercifully we’re spared that particular ceremony in the Oval office], and wins the hand of Rene Russo, inevitably luscious but here entirely too blonde.
Between the statement of the problem and its resolution Allen grinds gears around south Florida in an unusually pathetic Geo [statistically, we’re informed by Very Authoritative teenage chick Zooey Deschanel, the car most preferred by recently-divorced dork single dads] and his misadventures provide the excuse for the dispensation of a variety of Barryesque wisdom on Martha Stewart, hallucinogenic cane toads, Really Dumb Dogs, airport security, the male cop ego, squirt guns, Gator fans and AM sports talk radio, hippie derelicts who live in trees and eat nothing but Fritos, hit men, the construction industry, bombshell Latina maids, the cult of Xena the Warrior Princess, goats, and the art of the foot massage.
Janeane Garofalo plays a cop again. This is still a mistake.
Funny, but it should have been funnier. Barry should try again, and next time he should write the screenplay himself. It needed more boogers.
____________Barthelme (4/1/02)
