Director Report Card: Barry Sonnenfeld (2001)

7. Big Trouble

In the aftermath of a failure like “Wild Wild West,” Barry Sonnenfeld was probably eager to get back to his roots. No, not cinematography. I'm talking about mid-budget ensemble comedies. “Big Trouble” would be a comedy with lots of familiar faces but no superstars, with lots of wackiness going on, based on a novel from popular humorist Dave Berry. Sonnenfeld even brought the movie in a million dollars under-budget. This was no doubt a deliberate message to the studio that, after the runaway spending on his last movie, he could still operate on a tight budget. Sadly, bad luck would strike Sonnenfled's again. “Big Trouble,” a comedy about smuggling a bomb onto an airplane, was scheduled to come out in September... Of 2001. After the obvious happened, the movie was pushed back seven months and dropped into theaters with zero advertising, where it was obviously ignored. 

Eliot Arnold is an award-winning journalist who, after putting his foot through his boss' computer, is now running a failing ad agency. His son, Matt, is wrapped up in a game of “Killer” – tag with squirt guns – and sneaks into the home of Jenny Herk to spray her. The same night, a mob hitman has been hired to kill Jenny's dad, Arthur, a corporate man who has embezzled from his company. The attempt fails but it does cause Eliot to meet Arthur's wife, Anna. The two quickly hit it off. Arthur goes to buy a weapon from Russian arms dealers working out of a bar but purchases a suitcase nuke instead. After a pair of idiotic thugs break into the bar, a convoluted series of events drags all these characters – plus a cop crushed on his coworker, a tree-dwelling hippy, the religious family maid, a hallucinogen squirting toad, and a pair of FBI agents on the trail of the bomb – into a plot that concludes with the nuke on an airplane. 

“Big Trouble” is a movie that is almost self-conscious in its wackiness. Eliot narrates most of the film in a very knowingly smarmy, perhaps even smug, tone. It's a movie packed front-to-back with wacky characters or outrageous events. If they aren't a straight man dryly responding to events, seemingly every cast members is given a personality quirk to define them. Puggy, the aforementioned tree dwelling hippy, fixates on Fritos. Arthur has a disgusting foot fetish. The mob assassin hates people who smoke cigars in fancy restaurants. One of the FBI agents knows a lot of trivia about foreign countries, which he attributes to watching a lot of Discovery or Travel Channel. So on and so forth. “Big Trouble” is a movie that wants desperately to be funny and frontloads with as much wackiness as possible.

Despite how desperate that approach sounds, the results end up actually being pretty amusing. “Big Trouble” generates a lot of laughs. Some of these gags work well because they are a little more subtle than the movie's bigger yuks. Like a running joke about Florida Gator fans, constantly bickering on talk radio in the background. Or Nina, the aforementioned highly religious maid, becoming infatuated with Puggy because she mistakes him for Jesus while in a daze. At the same time, the movie's big and wacky gags work pretty well sometimes too. Like Arthur, under the effects of the toad's psychotropics, seeing Martha Stewart's face on the family dog's head. (Perhaps that gag works because “Big Trouble” really commits to the joke and got Stewart to play herself.) Or the sudden appearance of goats all throughout the last third, a set-up the movie successfully keeps returning to.

“Big Trouble” has been compared to “Get Shorty,” in that both of them follow a divergent cast of characters. Yet this film manages to do a better job of making those individual subplots work and is also more successful in bringing them together in a satisfying way. If someone shows up in “Big Trouble” once, odds are good they will appear again. Even Eliot's belligerent employer shows up again at the climax. The chance of fate that brings the idiot thugs back to the bar, just as Arthur is buying a weapon, is well executed. As is the contrivances that lead to Eliot and his son being in the house at the same time as the home invasion goes down. It's actually kind of impressive how the movie never looses the audience, how the viewer always remembers who all the characters are, where they're going in the story, and what their deal is. 

Another thing that keeps “Big Trouble” from spinning off into incoherence is the thematic layers connecting its various subplots. This is a movie, in ways subtle and obvious, that is all about sex. The male police officer becomes enamored of his no-nonsense female coworker after her frilly bra is revealed during a scuffle with a criminal. He constantly awkwardly interrupts their job to discuss the matter. Later, he also becomes distracted by a busty witness. Arthur and Anna's relationship is dying, largely because of her husband's nasty foot fixation, which is why he starts to creep on the maid. Anna is immediately attracted to Eliot, the two quickly tumbling into each other's arms. The sexual connotations in Matt shooting Jenny with a squirt-gun are constantly brought up and seem to speak to the sexual tension between the two teens. (She tells him more than once not to look at her ass, which obviously causes the teenage boy to look at her ass.)  

It's in every little corner of the movie. A dog thrusts its face into people's crotches. Porn-y aerobics shows are frequently spotted in the background. Eliot's employer demands the beer ad he ordered contain a big-titted blonde and the promise of getting laid. The mood of sexual frustration is such that mundane objects frequently take on a provocative tone. The mob hitman never successfully carries out his hit, his gun always misfiring. Is this pseudo-erectile dysfunction why he later becomes so angry at cigars? What about Eliot's attempt to be a big hero backfiring when the squirt gun he's disguised as a real gun starts to dribble? Is that a symbolic premature ejaculation? Does this bubbling subtext explain why the bad guy has a look of heavenly joy on his face before the symbolic orgasm of a white hot nuclear explosion? It would certainly explain a lot.

“Big Trouble's” linking with 9/11 is truly unfortunate. In many weird ways, this little movie defines both the era of filmmaking directly before and immediately after the tragedy. There's a minor joke about George W. Bush, that references his wannabe cowboy act. That was the main aspect that defined the president before September 11th changed everything for the world, this country, and that administration. At the same time, the subplot about FBI agents who overstep the boundaries of their office, shooting feet and breaking fingers all in the name of “protecting” America, feels eerily reminiscent of the Patriot Act era that began shortly after the movie's original release date. Suitcase nukes and dirty bombs were also something that wasn't really on anyone's mind much before 9/11 that came to dominate the news-cycle afterwards. I guess the point I'm making is that “Big Trouble” accidentally captured a snapshot of America just before it changed forever. 

That bomb, jokingly referred to as a resembling a garbage disposal throughout the film, ends up providing a ticking time limit for the final act. After the bomb is smuggled through airport security – something that definitely wouldn't have been possible a year later – it is flicked on. After that, the forty minute timer, always ticking down, appears on-screen several times. A narrative device like this is always a good way to provide more tension to a story. Considering “Big Trouble” is a comedy, that just causes the movie's madcap tone to escalate more. Which is actually exactly what you want from a movie as wacky as this. 

Another thing distinctly marking “Big Trouble” as a product of pre-9/11 2001 is that it's a starring role for Tim Allen. As an actor, Allen is a perfectly suitable middlebrow white guy, just charismatic enough to not be a total bore. But he's definitely the least interesting character and performer in a movie full of memorable actors. And it doesn't help that Eliot has a totally blasé middle-age white guy kind of character arc too. He's dissatisfied with his work. He thinks his son doesn't respect him. (Probably because his son says he doesn't respect him.) The adventure throughout the film gives him the angle he needs to find work as a journalist again and proves to his boy that he's actually cool. Forgettable stuff.

Luckily, “Big Trouble” has a stacked supporting cast to make up for its stock-parts leading man. Rene Russo gets to go delightfully over-the-top as Anna Herk, displaying a previously unseen talent for slapstick comedy. Stanley Tucci, similarly, plays Arthur as a grotesquely selfish and rotten person, Tucci making such behavior theatrically entertaining. Ben Foster, long before he became a recognizable name, has a fittingly sarcastic attitude as Eliot's son, that plays well off of Allen's delivery. Zooey Deschanel, also long before she became a star and sans her iconic black bangs, plays Jenny Jerk. Deschanel's dry delivery is especially amusing. Tom Sizemore is cast extremely to type as Snake, the dumb-ass criminal that inadvertently cooks up the bombing plot. Sizemore really commits to playing an imbecile,  something Johnny Knoxville as his sidekick leans into even more. 

Dennis Farina, reappearing from “Get Shorty,” adds a likable neurotic edge to his usual Mafiso tough guy act. Janeane Garofalo, also playing to type as a sarcastic straight woman surrounded by chaos, also gets a few good quibs off. Patrick Warburton, as is usually the case, is a highlight as the horny cop. Warburton's ability to turn a dumb, even potentially annoying, character into a likable doofus can never be understated. Jason Lee is also well utilized as Puggy, bringing a child-like wide-eyed quality to the role. Sofia Vergara, another performer appearing before they became more famous, plays off him nicely. Andy Richter gets a few stray laughs as an alcoholic security guard. (Though not so much in his second role as an airport security guard.) Lastly, Heavy D and Omar Epps are amusingly deadpan as the FBI agents. 

I have no idea how “Big Trouble” would have been received if September 11th, 2001 had ended up just being another day. It's a consistently amusing comedy that has some interesting touches. It's over quickly enough, leaves you with a bit of a smile, but doesn't linger in the brain too long afterwards. Maybe it would've connected with audiences and made a decent amount at the box office. Instead, the movie wound up buried, almost totally forgotten save for the unfortunate circumstances of its release. I was happy to see that the movie was a little better than I recalled. If you go in with reasonably measured expectations, perhaps you'll enjoy it too. [Grade: B]