Review: Allen and Co. in ‘Trouble’ from the start

Geoff Carter

Friday, April 5, 2002 | 10:09 a.m.

Big Trouble

Grade: * 1/2

Starring: Tim Allen, Renee Russo, Stanley Tucci, Tom Sizemore and Jason Lee.

Screenplay: Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone.

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld.

Rated: PG-13 for language, crude humor and sex-related material.

Running time: 93 minutes.

Movie time: http://www.vegas.com/movies/

"Big Trouble" opens the way more comedies should open -- with the smiling face of Jason Lee. "My name is Puggy and I live in a tree," he says. "I hope I didn't give too much away."

Sadly, he isn't giving anything away. A movie about a tree-dwelling Lee might have had some value, but "Big Trouble" is a dull and patently stupid ensemble comedy based on a novel written by Dave Barry. Tim Allen, Renee Russo, Stanley Tucci, Janeane Garofalo, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Patrick Warburton, Johnny Knoxville and Zooey Deschanel are all forced to jockey for position throughout this laborious exercise, and only Lee survives the wreck. Score one for the tree people.

Allen plays a former Miami Herald columnist caught up in the intrigue surrounding a mysterious suitcase. This is Earnest Tim Allen -- read, Unfunny, Unengaging Tim Allen, and not the drunk-driving misanthrope this comedy badly needs. He's obviously a proxy character for Barry, a lowly Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who wishes he could do something valuable with his life, i.e. kick the tar out of some terrorists and bed Russo.

Russo's character is married to Arthur Herk (Tucci), a foot-fetishist and low-level arms dealer who's the second most interesting character in "Big Trouble," next to Lee's Puggy. Most of the credit goes to the actor, who winds up Herk tighter than a straitjacket and bellows his way out. He crawls, he whines, he makes idiotic threats, and you hate his guts: job well done. Everyone else is in the film half-asleep, or perhaps lost a bet.

Lee has only been creeping up on you. Fans of Kevin Smith's films -- we are few, but we are influential -- have been sold on this guy since he grinned his way through Smith's unfairly-maligned "Mallrats." By the time he yanked the tablecloth out from under "Mumford" and "Almost Famous," his star was completely assured: The right people had seen him. He steals "Big Trouble" by being something the film desperately needs, something he's never played before: a near-mute.

You just flat-out love Puggy. Whether he's sleeping in a refigerator box, reading Martha Stewart's Living, staring down the film's meatheaded villains (Tom Sizemore and Johnny Knoxville) or eying a plate of Fritos as if it were manna from heaven, Lee steals every scene he's in, and from some pretty serious actors. (Dennis Farina and Lee have an all-too-brief encounter; I'd like to see the two of them work together again, under better circumstances.)

The blame falls almost solely on director Barry Sonnenfeld, who obviously took this project to redeem the criticisms levelled against him after "Wild Wild West" -- that he mismanaged his actors, blew the pacing and leaned too heavily on visuals. I'd blame "West" on a poor concept and script, a mistake Sonnenfeld repeats here. He's so pleased by the popularity of the source material -- millions read Dave Barry, I don't -- that he never stopped to question its quality.

The script of "Big Trouble" didn't need a legion of name actors; it needed one sharpened red pencil. And as much as I hate to agree with the Motion Picture Association of America, I agree completely with their description of "Big Trouble's" PG-13 rating: "crude humor."

Look hard, and you can almost see Sonnenfeld and Barry in the background in woolly mammoth skins, banging rocks against their laptops.