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At the Movies
with Mark Moorehead

Film: Big Trouble

Cast: Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Stanley Tucci, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore

Rating: PG-13

Director: Barry Sonnenfield

Now Playing: Harkins Chandler Fashion 20, Harkins Arizona Mills, Centerpoint 11

Viewability Rating: *** (worth a look)

 

Director Barry Sonnenfield and Disney were in serious trouble last September when Big Trouble was scheduled for release.  Prior to Sept.  11,  who knew a comic theme involving lax airport security and big bombs would soon become anathema to the movie-viewing public.

Disney quickly dropped the film back into the can and kept it there until this week. It will be interesting to see how the public responds to Big Trouble six months after much Bigger Trouble on 9/11.

Perhaps folks will overlook all the fuss this film is stirring and allow themselves to chuckle at a subject heretofore taboo on the movie screen. After all, this is a comedy involving bubbling petty criminals and familiar tool-time comic Tim Allen, not Arab terrorists.    

As far as plots go, this one is convoluted and farcical as it layers several unrelated but intertwining themes.

At the bottom of this layered cake of plots we begin with kids playing a game called Killer with squirt guns. The goal to is squirt a designated person at night wherever the person may live, work or play.

Next, add two professional hit men with real guns trying to knock off a white-collar thief at the home where the designated kid in the Killer game prepares to receive a stream of water.

In turn, our white-collar thief is in the market for a big bomb to blow up his own enemies, and two small-time crooks are looking to fence something really big.

On top of this add two FBI agents looking for arms dealers selling bombs; two Miami cops chasing anyone and everyone; an oddball drifter voyeur; an odd couple with marital problems and two teenagers looking for the meaning of life.

Just visualize this: a dozen flaky characters, mayhem, sight gags and slapstick.

Big Trouble is proof that comedy is a tough business. Stand-up comedians fear silence more than anything else and sometimes panic, resorting to bathroom humor and sight gags.

Barry Sonnenfeld must have panicked when making this film because he resorts to sight gags that are not only not funny but also strangely out of place. A big toad with hallucinogenic properties, antics of the family dog and toe sucking by Stanley Tucci (playing shady businessman Arthur Herk) were thrown into the comic mix in a desperate attempt to generate a smirk. It doesn’t work. 

Overkill is another mistake a comic or a director of comedy will make when it’s feared an audience might turn on you.

The reasoning is as follows: if two bumbling characters are funny, why not eight. However, just as too many cooks spoil the broth, two many fools spoil the slapstick. Imagine six stooges instead of three.

As the late George Burns was fond to say:

“For every funny man you have you need a straight man and Gracie was my straight man.”

Likewise, Big Trouble needs more “straight men”, the type of likeable, everyday man or woman caught up in bizarre and absurd situations.  Comedies such as Naked Gun, Raising Arizona, Men in Black, What About Mary and Rat Race have that right balance of zaniness, and they click with audiences.

Tim Allen (playing Eliot Arnold) and Rene Russo (playing Anna Herk) are the only ones playing straight roles in Big Trouble, and they keep the movie from floundering.

In one of the movie’s big scenes Allen and Russo are clean but experience a rigorous screening at airport security while two low-life bums with a suitcase nuclear bomb pass effortlessly through.

This scene is really funny because it reminds us all of the little injustices we hear in the news involving an elderly man or woman being strip searched at airport security while an intoxicated, 25-year-old male is later discovered on the aircraft carrying his favorite Bowie knife. .      

Not all viewers will find humor in a nuclear bomb passing through airport security or the idea of a struggle over a bomb on a commercial aircraft.

In this respect, the normally casual decision making process of choosing whether or not to see such a movie could get complicated, pitting family member against family member, friend against friend and even split an entire community.

Yes, there’s trouble right here in River City, and it begins with T and it ends with E, and that spells trouble…trouble…trouble…Big Trouble…right here in River City.

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