'Fun With Dick and Jane'

By Norman Wilner, Special to Zap2it.com, Zap2It.com | July 12, 2008

Jim Carrey (left) and Tea Leoni in 'Fun With Dick and Jane'

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Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni are terrific comedians, and they work very well together -- they've got a sort of sympathetic craziness that makes them a perfect pair for a remake of a 1977 caper comedy where George Segal and Jane Fonda became white-collar couple who become criminals to keep up with the Joneses.

Well, the concept translates nicely to our post-Enron reality ... but while the new "Fun with Dick and Jane" made sure to point out the evils of unchecked corporate callousness, it somehow managed to leave out the fun.

Carrey and Leoni seem appropriately frazzled as Dick and Jane, a happy suburban couple forced down the economic ladder by the sudden convulsion of the job market: Dick's company implodes while he's talking up its prospects on cable TV, leaving him unemployable, and Jane doesn't appear to have any exploitable skills.

After spending half the movie trying to cover their mortgage with a series of menial jobs -- including Dick's stint as a migrant worker and Jane's participation in a drug trial, which leaves them both comically disfigured -- they turn to crime, and you can feel the movie bracing for takeoff.

And that's when screenwriters Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller bring it screeching to a halt with a silly revenge plot that has Dick and Jane orchestrating a sting on Dick's duplicitous former boss (Alec Baldwin): It boils down to switching one piece of paper for another one.

The original "Fun with Dick and Jane" wasn't exactly a film for the ages, but it did have something to say about the state of American consumer culture, and the dark appeal of abandoning societal conventions to live on the edge. The closest this movie comes, really, is in a running gag about a repossessed lawn.

Sony's DVD offers both full-frame and enhanced-widescreen presentations of the feature, along with a rather meager selection of extras: Director Dean Parisot and writers Apatow and Stoller open their audio commentary by saying "we have a lot to say ... not about the movie, but we have a lot to say," and that turns out to be exactly the case, as they proceed to spend an hour and a half avoiding any discussion of the disconnect between their intentions and the results. (At one point, Apatow tells a story about having dinner with Mick Jagger and Ben Stiller that goes, well, nowhere.)

The rest of the disc is equally immaterial. Six deleted scenes and a gag reel are what they are -- a bedroom scene is really quite funny, perfectly capturing the concept of Carrey and Leoni as bland yuppies scared by the edge they're so desperately chasing -- and instead of a look behind the scenes, or even a bog-standard production featurette, there's a three-minute reel of the stars being interviewed on the press junket. Given his producer credit, and the belief he espouses in the project, it's really quite astonishing that those jokey clips are the sum total of Carrey's participation on the DVD. Maybe he just wanted to put it behind him as quickly as possible.

STUDIO: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2006
RATING: PG-13
PRICE: $28.95
TIME: 90 minutes
DVD EXTRAS: French audio dub; English and French subtitles; audio commentary; deleted scenes; gag reel; publicity footage.
INTERNET SITE: sonypictures.com/funwithdickandjane