Ticket Stubs #56: Fun With Dick & Jane

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,
Wishing you a Happy Valentine's Day!

The month of love continues with the end (but it was originally the beginning) of the Fun With Guns trilogy, and a review that is the only reason I have "fun with dick" on my blog search history.
Here are the first two parts if you haven't shown them love yet:

• Ticket Stubs #54: National Treasure & Lord Of War
• Ticket Stubs #55: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

You can also share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Like the other Fun With Guns reviews, this one is also FROM February 14, 2006, and it was the lead-off review in that lost triple-feature. Jim Carrey had just come off a string of "comedic genius tries drama and fans are not pleased" movies like Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, The Majestic, Man On the Moon, and The Number 23 (with a few comedies, book adaptations, and genre films in between, but this was generally the era of "Serious Jim"). I was not a Lemony Snicket fan, so Fun With Dick & Jane was what I personally considered to be his return to purely comedic roles, and you'll see that reflected in the review itself as follows:

Meet Jim. Jim is funny. See Jim turn into Rubberman. Bend, Jim, bend.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Type, Ticketmaster, type!

Jim Carrey gets funny again for his latest film after realizing he can act without being bland and getting a bunch of disappointed fans. Not to drop names, but *COUGH* The Majestic, *COUGH* Eternal Sunshine, *COUGH*. I must be allergic to sell-outs. Anyway, Jim and Tea Leoni star as a husband and wife who get shafted during an Enron-type dotcom collapse and step into a life of crime. Alec Baldwin is always good in the eccentric bad guy role; and whether jacking someone's astroturf ("I got the lawn back!"), quitting a job at--nice avoidance of a copyright suit--Kostmart ("How do you expect a man to live on such a poor salary?!" as he gets in his multi-HK dollar BMW), or robbing a convenience store as if he's just another customer (with a gun, who isn't going to pay for anything, wearing a Bill Clinton mask) Jim Carrey is FUN-NEE. Great references to the Dick & Jane kids' books, incorporation of the Let's Screw Up One Last Job genre, and pokes at the world of cheating, corporate assholes. But I apologize; this movie also shows that cheating, corporate assholes are people, too. Carrey on, folks!
A-

Speaking of rubbermen, I've been watching the One Piece anime since November, and I plan to start dropping arc reviews in April, so Stay Tuned for that, and please continue to share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is next week....

Ticketmaster,

Out.

P.S.: I did not realize this fact until I began looking for a cover image for the movie, but Fun With Dick & Jane is a remake of a 1977 film of the same name starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as the titular couple. I obviously haven't seen it for comparison purposes, but the criminal activity of the couple apparently lacks the "getting screwed over by Big Business" context that locks the remake to its era of release. Put this one on the books for 2025 so I can do a comparison piece next year.