Fun with Dick and Jane (2005)
Directed by Dean Parisot
After Dick Harper loses his job at Globodyne in an Enron-esque collapse, he and his wife, Jane, turn to crime in order to handle the massive debt they now face. Two intelligent people, Dick and Jane actually get pretty good at robbing people and even enjoy it – but they have second thoughts when they're reminded that crime can hurt innocent people. When the couple hears that Globodyne boss Jack McCallister actually swindled the company, they plot revenge.
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What critics compared Fun with Dick and Jane to
As Gwen, Leoni ( Fun with Dick and Jane ) turns in a beautifully nuanced performance.
Directed by Nicholas Stoller (writer of 2005's " Fun with Dick and Jane ," making his helming debut) and written by lead actor Jason Segel, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" unavoidably reminds of 2007's " The Heartbreak Kid ," a mean-spirited turkey that also happened to be a bawdy romantic comedy set in an exotic locale.
The film is written by first-time writer Jason Segel (who features himself in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” as main-character Peter Bretter – and often buck naked, too) and directed by first-time director Nicholas Stoller (who wrote 2005’s “Fun With Dick and Jane”).
Apatow’s anomaly here isn’t that he always chooses golden-touch projects like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” or “Knocked Up.” He’s certainly lent his name to a fair share of duds this decade: “Kicking and Screaming,” “Fun With Dick and Jane,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” and, only last month, “Drillbit Taylor.”
This round, Apatow—in his producer capacity—hands over the reins of both writer and star to an alumnus of his old Freaks and Geeks TV series, Jason Segel, and gives the directing chores to first-timer Nicholas Stoller, who wrote the unfortunate Fun With Dick and Jane (2005) remake.
For a while, as I watched him in The Number 23, Joel Schumacher's glossy ''dark'' thriller about murder, numerology, and, you know, what's ''real,'' I experienced the awkwardness I have so often felt, at movies like The Majestic or the remake of Fun With Dick and Jane, when a Jim Carrey ordinary-guy performance isn't working.
When Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey, "Fun with Dick and Jane") begins reading the murder mystery given to him for his birthday by his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen, "Sideways"), he finds that it parallels reality in deeply disturbing ways and he begins to share with the novel's protagonist, a detective named Fingerling, an obsession for something he begins to find everywhere - "The Number 23."
Hardest to watch isn't Schumacher's umpteenth treatise on how to shine any project to a frictionless, dimwit, burlesque sheen, but rather Carrey's betrayal of himself by following Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a limp Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events , a dreadful Fun with Dick and Jane , and now this.