Where's the disclaimer: "This movie brought to you by the Democratic National Committee."
What's happening in Hollywood when Fun with Dick and Jane is a more passionate political shout-out than Syriana? Make that political tantrum—for all its corporate, Enron-ish Bushie-bashing, it's also more childish, leaning toward infantile.
This Dick infuriates not because of its left-wing ideology—I'd have welcomed more of it in Syriana if the characters were worth a damn—but because of how transparently and unartistically it expresses it.
In this "update" of 1977's George Segal-Jane Fonda heist-capade, Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni are the upper-middle-class couple who, after Dick loses his corporate vice presidency, his company crumbles and they spiral to near-homelessness, resorts to crime to keep them in the lifestyle to which they refuse to become unaccustomed.
The original at least entertained while sticking a snarky tongue out at the '70s consumerist culture, fueled by the once- nonmaterialistic, free-lovin' idealists of the '60s. And it pulled it off with some finesse, via a clever script that skewered those skewed values through the characters' actions and story setup, without resorting to ham-fisted political preachiness.
If only this Dick were as funny as it is indignant.
Why set it in 2000? Perhaps to plaster "Gore/Lieberman" placards across background shots to suggest how America blew it at the polls? To posit it as a prescient ramp-up to the Enron debacle a year later? Not that it minds hop-scotching references across a time line: a poke at Bush's maxi-vacations during a crisis, a callous-chief-executive-on-the-links bit lifted straight out of Fahrenheit 9/11 and clips of Bush on TV so the audience can boo on cue. It's the cheapest emotion to tap, and they tap it.
Carrey looks confused in an awkward role: His common-man Dick is stretched to somewhere between reality and cartoonishness to accommodate his manic shtick, rather than capitulate to believable character development. He's part-Mask, part-Truman. Leoni, whose smaller-scale charms better suit TV, pales against her megawatt costar. Only Alec Baldwin, as a charmingly amoral corporate creep of Ken Lay proportions, throws himself into his role with assurance; he must've adored barbecuing the bastards in suits in a comic riff on his Aviator role. But he's not enough to make a funny, entertaining movie out of a screechy, shallow screed.