(out of four)
By David N. Butterworth
Take Tim Allen, a super soaker squirt gun, the director of Get Shorty,
a Carl Hiassen-styled Dave Barry novel, Get Shorty’s Rene Russo, a
nuclear device that looks like a garbage disposal, Dennis Farina reprising his Get
Shorty tough guy role, a hallucinogenic venom-spraying toad, Stanley Tucci
sucking on an Hispanic maid’s toes, Get Shorty’s Miami setting, Tom
Sizemore with a panty on his head, Fritos®, Jason Lee munching on them
incessantly, and a goat, and you’ve got a whole heck of a lot of trouble. Big
Trouble.
Like Get Shorty, that inventive 1995 John Travolta flick based on an
Elmore Leonard novel, Big Trouble is wild and wacky and thoroughly
entertaining. It’s not as good as ‘Shorty but it sure tries its
damndest to be (and every now and again it succeeds, winningly).
Originally slated for an October 2001 release, the film was quickly pulled
from distribution following the events of September 11th. That’s largely
because of its central plot motif of a nuclear bomb being successfully smuggled
onto an airplane. Big Trouble is not so much a comedy about terrorism,
per se, and who knows if we’re really ready for that on this kind of madcap
scale, but a colorful and creative farce about a Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist turned ad man (Allen, typically strong here) who unwittingly becomes
involved with some bad sorts when his son... Well, the plot doesn’t so much
matter as do the situations and the humor that director Barry (Men in Black
and the upcoming Men in Black II) Sonnenfeld manages to draw from them.
Big Trouble might have worked a little better with the mania cranked
up a few notches. That’s a strange thing to say about a movie that’s pretty
manic to begin with but it just doesn’t move as quickly as it might and you
feel the need for it to hit those hysteria levels more often than it does. The
dialogue is pretty much lifted straight from humorist Barry’s pages, and Rene
Russo looks great as a blonde, once again enlivening anything she’s in
(whether it be clothes or the movie itself!).
Speaking of Russo the cast is uniformly great. Ben Foster and Zooey Deschanel
play the kids whose high school game of “killer” starts the turbulent events
in motion. Also pretty terrific are Janeane Garofalo and Patrick Warburton
(David Puddy on Seinfeld, a role with which he’ll forever be
associated) as Miami’s finest who have more than their hands full putting up
with Tucci’s foaming at the mouth.
Sonnenfeld’s film lurches all over the place but there’s so much going
on, and so many great performers to watch that its slipshod pacing, constant
crudeness, and missed opportunities don’t seem to matter. If you go in
expecting another Get Shorty you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re
looking for a fun time at the movies then Big Trouble is definitely the
ticket.
