Date:10/02/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/fr/2006/02/10/stories/2006021002630700.htm

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Lacklustre spoof

A HOLIDAY MOVIE: Fun with Dick and Jane.

Fun with Dick and Jane

Genre: Comedy
Director: Dean Parisot
Cast: Jim Carrey, Tea Leoni, Alec Baldwin
Storyline: Upwardly mobile Dick and Jane live the American dream, until the plug is pulled from their plasma TV, tossing them into the real world.
Bottomline: Neither here nor there

As a film that sees the possibility for humour in the Enron scandal, you'd expect clever social commentary. Instead, you get Jim Carrey flapping his arms in an elevator, singing ``I Believe I can Fly."

To be fair, you do get a few laughs. But you get the feeling that after Carrey signed on the dotted line, the filmmakers felt that script be damned, it would be wrong not to make the funny man do his stuff.

So most of the slapstick bits look like Carrey is hamming.

Carrey plays Dick, who has a storybook family that lives in a pretty house in a nice neighbourhood. You meet Dick. See Dick run. Meet Jane (Tea Leoni), their son Billy, and Spot, the dog. They live happily with plans to landscape their garden, build a pool in their backyard and wait for Dick's promotion.

All this happens, but things go terribly wrong the day after Dick becomes vice-president Globodyne, where he works. He is fired.

Suddenly, both Dick and Jane find themselves unemployed, desperate and bathing at the sprinklers on their neighbour's lawn.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and when Jane reminds him that they have to get up early to stand in line at the soup kitchen, Dick decides it is time to act.

Thus the good couple is pushed to adopting Bonnie and Clyde's methods of income. But they are good at heart, so things finally work out for them.

Yes, it's as lacklustre as it sounds.

The best part of the film is Alec Baldwin who plays Jack McCallister, unscrupulous big boss of Globodyne. While his former employees are reduced to crime, he shamelessly saunters amidst his wealth, genuinely unconcerned.

That's funny, and the most effective spoof of all.This is a holiday movie, so if you are in the mood for some light not-too-entertaining entertainment, then this is a candidate.

SUSAN MUTHALALY