Bilgi :Basically, act one is too long, act two is too short and act three comes from another movie.
The original "Fun With Dick & Jane" is remembered mostly for reflecting its era.
Released in 1977 when the energy crisis and high inflation were fresh memories, the movie spoofed life during economic malaise. George Segal and Jane Fonda played an upwardly mobile executive and his wife who resort to robbing banks to maintain their lifestyle after he gets fired.
Director Dean Parisot, working from Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller's script, attempts to update the material to reflect the corporate scandals of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, etc. He picks a winning pair to play the new Dick and Jane: Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni (who came to the production after Cameron Diaz dropped out).
If the remake was supposed to be a satire of Enron culture, though, then someone chickened out. Perhaps fearing the material would be read as an attack on President Bush, the filmmakers set the story during 2000 while Bush was still campaigning for president. Either that or Parisot needed an excuse to work in Ralph Nader's weird cameo appearance.
Alec Baldwin, who just played the billionaire CEO who fired Orlando Bloom in "Elizabethtown," plays the billionaire CEO who sets up Carrey as a patsy when his company, Globodyne, implodes once its phony bookkeeping is exposed. After several months of unemployment, which seem to play out on the screen in real time, Dick decides to become a hold-up man. Jane tags along, thinking he is kidding.
The story is so botched that Parisot steps aside and lets Carrey improvise jokes and weird facial expressions. This is known as punting, Robin Williams-style, and at this point in his career, Carrey shouldn't have to resort to such desperation.
In Carrey's defense, he probably did not expect so much of his clowning would appear in the finished film. The plot advances so haphazardly that "Dick & Jane" plays like a movie fundamentally reconfigured in the editing room.
I doubt the film now in theaters is the one Carrey and Leoni set out to make. I especially have a hard time believing that Apatow, the writer-director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the producer of the wondrous "Freaks and Geeks," could write a screenplay this inept.
Most fiction follows a well-established three-act structure of set-up, escalation and resolution. Act one establishes a challenge for the hero. The stakes increase in act two. The hero resolves the conflict in act three. The first and third acts are supposed to be brief, just long enough to get the job done.
"Fun With Dick & Jane" takes too long to reach the point where the title characters become stick-up artists and then barely develops this plot before introducing a brand new conflict (an elaborate heist) to be resolved. Basically, act one is too long, act two is too short and act three comes from another movie.
From what we see of the movie that supplied the ending, it stinks, too.
movie review by Jeffrey Westhoff, Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, IL)
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