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This Issue 09/20/2001

Also in this issue

• MOVIES: The Musketeer
• Get a Nightlife: Here's a Leg, Here's a Wing
• Bathed in the Limelight

Big Trouble is best defined by two of its many long running jokes: fritos and
goats. If these two gimmicks don't sound funny on their own, or together, then
Big Trouble's makers hope they will be funny after you see them a million times.
This tactic fails miserably with some repeated jokes, such as the explanation of
"I saw it on the Discovery Channel" every time an obscure fact is mentioned. But
as in the case of fritos and goats (and squirt guns, FBI codes and Martha
Stewart), the more times you see them, the funnier they become.

Based on a Dave Barry novel, Big Trouble doesn't really have a plot so much as
it has characters. The cast list is long and the talent is plentiful. Puggy, a
frito-loving bum played by Jason Lee, leaves Boston for Miami because he
reads in a Martha Stewart Living magazine that Miami has the highest
concentration of Cuban restaurants, which he believes is as close as he can get
to frito heaven. Patrick Warburton plays a cop looking for the cosmic loophole,
which will allow him to skip all the pre-sex talking and get to sex already. And in
the course of the film, he discovers his love of being publicly nude. Dennis
Farina, who you might recognize as the gangster from Snatch, is a riot again as
a gangster stuck in a surreal Miami (much like the horrible London in Snatch)
trying to get back home to New York.

The film has just enough wacky characters to keep the storylines interesting.
Predictably, though, Tim Allen, who plays a loser divorced dad, and Rene
Russo, as a soon-to-be-twice-divorced mom, are the flat, unfunny-yet-obligatory
romance portion of the flick.

The film is short and only gets funnier as the nonsensical story lines continue. In
essence, Big Trouble consists of funny one-liners set on bizarre characters and
situations to fill in the gaps. The humor is not of the mass-produced variety like
American Pie 2, but rather, it remains in the quirky genre much like Barry
Sonnenfeld's other films such as Get Shorty. Big Trouble is somewhat
self-conscious in its attempt to be different, but if you just lean back and enjoy it's
quite easy to swallow, bad jokes and all.