Big Trouble | Review

Sonnenfeld misfires with post 9/11 comedy.

Barry Sonnenfeld finally gets to unleash one of the year’s most brutal films- a loud and obnoxious comedy that needed a lot more than an football team-sized ensemble cast and a bunch of puns that circle around Martha Stewart and bags of Fritos to come anywhere close to replicating the comedic success of a Get Shorty. Originally Big Trouble was slated for a fall 2001 release but got grounded and pushed all the way back into April because of a sequence that features a plane, a hijacker and a bomb. This scene wasn’t funny before the September events, and nor is it any funnier today, not too mention the timing is just as bad as Arnie’s Collateral Damage. But unfortunately, this just isn’t the case of one sequence being bad-it also happens to be the case for the entire film. Like a Miami Vice episode mixed in with The Rat Race, the storyline includes the common being-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time motif which gives it a diet 2 Days in the Valley like scenario that goes all over the Orange state map. The twists and turns include: a mob-hit gone wrong- an interest in a suitcase- a bunch of people holding guns and a wild goose chase finale.

Not that the film starts off on the wrong foot; the introduction is marinated with some fun one liners and laughable gags, but somehow, somewhere the actual attempts at gag humor either becomes extremely irritating or too sparse and nonlinear to make this into a big comic romp. With a slight resemblance to a Get Shorty-like style: Sonnenfeld makes the most of the use of narration, the use of freeze frames and close-up shots to bring the audience closer to the storyline and to the characters, sadly I found that the more we are acquainted with them the less we’d care to know. Perhaps, some of the characters are slightly too cartoon-ish with an over-the-top exaggerated performances that come off as simply annoying. The cast of recognizable faces such as Tim Allen (Toy Story), Jason Lee (Vanilla Sky) and Stanley Tucci (Big Night) compete for screen time and are outshined by lesser parts such as a cameo by Andy Richter (Run Ronnie Run!) as the drunken security guards and Dennis Farina (Out of Sight) where he reprises an identical role to the one he played in Snatch, – the restaurant etiquette scene is probably the best moment of the film.

Instead of being the zany film it aspires to be, it comes across like a film, which is desperately trying to force its humor upon its audience, and half way during the feature you desperately want to get off this sick circus ride. This wacky film needed to be funny, but with more misfires than an Afghan scud missile-Big Trouble comes off looking more like just another celluloid tragedy.

Rating 0.5 stars