Big Trouble (film)
From AwardAnnals
| Film: | Big Trouble |
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| Director: | Barry Sonnenfeld |
| Genres: | |
| Distributor: | Walt Disney Video |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
The frantic pacing of Big Trouble is surely intentional, but the movie leaves you wanting more of…something. Not more characters—it’s got plenty of those—but more room for them to breathe in a top-heavy plot that recalls Get Shorty (also directed by Barry Sonnenfeld) without reaching those heights of ingenuity. Based on the bestseller by syndicated Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, this Miami-based mayhem bears the distinct imprint of Barry’s humor, in which absurdities pile up like rush-hour traffic, involving a former journalist (Tim Allen) connected by circumstance to a wealthy schemer (Stanley Tucci), his bored wife (Rene Russo), Russian mobsters, mismatched cops (Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton), power-crazed FBI agents (Heavy D, Omar Epps), a Frito-loving drifter (Jason Lee), cretinous criminals (Tom Sizemore, Johnny Knoxville), and a gigantic toad that shoots hallucinogenic saliva. Culminating in an airport bomb smuggling (prompting the film’s delayed release after the tragedy of September 11, 2001), Big Trouble needs the brilliant cohesion of Dr. Strangelove; what it gets is Sonnenfeld’s knack for sustained chaos, and a few decent belly laughs. —Jeff Shannon
Related works
Big Trouble: A Novel
Dave Barry makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel of love and mayhem in south Florida.
In his career, Dave Barry has done just about everything—written bestselling nonfiction, won a Pulitzer Prize, seen his life turned into a television series. And now, at last, he has joined the long list of literary figures from Jane Austen to Tolstoy who have made the transition from humor columnist to novelist…and done it with a style and inventiveness that establishes that, yes, he is very good at that, too.
In the city of Coconut Grove, Florida, these things happen: A struggling adman named Eliot Arnold drives home from a meeting with the Client From Hell. His teenage son, Matt, fills a Squirtmaster 9000 for his turn at a high school game called Killer. Matt’s intended victim, Jenny Herk, sits down in front of the TV with her mom for what she hopes will be a peaceful evening for once. Jenny’s alcoholic and secretly embezzling stepfather, Arthur, emerges from the maid’s room, angry at being rebuffed. Henry and Leonard, two hit men from New Jersey, pull up to the Herks’…
