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First, to answer the question everybody asks about a movie like Fun With Dick And Jane: Yes. Every funny joke is in the trailer.
And the scene therein where Jim Carrey sings I Believe I Can Fly on an elevator is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with this comedic mishmash. It plays as if the script said simply “Jim gets on elevator and does funny stuff.”
So Fun With Dick And Jane is a slapstick Jim Carrey improv comedy. Or maybe it’s a biting satire of the Enron era. Certainly the studio wanted to know which one it was. After principal photography, the filmmakers were ordered back to reshoot the whole last act, reportedly to give the film more focus.
The problem is Fun With Dick And Jane doesn’t have the surehanded direction and timing to work as slapstick, and it’s not smart enough to work as satire.
A remake of the 1977 consumerist-spoof with Jane Fonda and George Segal, Fun With Dick And Jane is set in the “innocent” year 2000 and stars Carrey as Dick Harper, a corporate exec who, as the movie opens, is promoted to the v-p job of his dreams by the company’s cowboy jerk CEO (Alec Baldwin).
It turns out, however, that he’s been set up as the fall-guy when the CEO siphons hundreds of millions of dollars out of the firm and lets it collapse (along with Dick’s pension fund and future).
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So far so linear. But the central gag in the original Dick And Jane — the yuppies turn to bank robbing — takes forever to arrive in this film as our Dick and Jane (Tea Leoni), run through a bunch of job auditions, wacky McJobs and bottom-of-the-barrel pursuits. Some of them are funny, some painfully unfunny, and all of them have a rough-edged, barely rehearsed feel to them that make them look as if Carrey came up with them the night before.
The bank-robbing is the only strongly-written stuff in Fun With Dick And Jane. Leoni, a natural comic actress, gets laughs just laughing derisively at her husband’s criminal ineptitude.
But just as the film seems to find a note, it veers off again — to that aforementioned third act, and a half-baked “sting” scheme to get the company’s money back. It makes no sense and, as a plot point, meets an unceremonious end. Like the rest of the film, the end seems made up on the fly, hastily and unfunnily, like a Krusty the Klown monologue.
Bottom line
A mishmash of a comedy that takes the bones of the 1977 George Segal/Jane Fonda original and grafts an Enron/Worldcom type “message” on it. The gaping holes are filled with run amok Jim Carrey slapstick turns that seem to have been improvised five minutes before the camera rolled.