Fun With Dick and Jane

Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni swap the executive lifestyle for a criminal one in Fun with Dick and Jane.

Herald rating: * *

Jim Carrey and Hollywood continue their long-running exercise in proving they ran out of ideas long ago and are recycling performances and inspiration.

Fun With Dick and Jane is yet another remake, this time of a 1977 comedy starring Jane Fonda and George Segal. Carrey plays Dick, executive of a global conglomerate, who is promoted to vice-president in charge of communications moments before its shares go into meltdown while he's live on TV. His wife, Jane (Tea Leoni), is a travel agent. Or was: she quit that day because of Dick's promotion.

The executive lifestyle is not so much a faded dream as the aftermath of Chernobyl. Gardeners roll up the ready-lawn, the couple lose their super, furniture, utilities. Dick's job interviews are futile; his embarrassment multiplied because many of the prospective employers saw him on TV.

Dick and Jane realise that there may be one way out. They become robbers. They start off small time and the heists become bigger and bigger. Exponentially, as Dick might have said when he was a vice-president in charge of communications. You'll get most of the Carrey shtick: slapstick, wigs, false beards, bank hold-ups that go awry.

For American viewers, there is some contemporary resonance here, a mild satire of the Enron scandal (documentary fans will recall that Enron executives deliberately set up an energy crisis in California, making millions out of the scam while people died in the cold). Alec Baldwin and Richard Jenkins are the best thing in this movie, a parody of the real-life execs, though the script won't give them quite enough rein. The rest of it is a yawn.

* DVD, video rental today