Fun with Dick and Jane (2005)

If you like Jim Carrey's style of humor, then you will probably enjoy his antics with Téa Leoni (who starred as a similarly harried housewife with Nicholas Cage in Family Man). They play a suburban couple, Dick and Jane Harper, who fall from the penthouse to the outhouse. Dick is promoted to vice president for communications at Globodyne, a promotion so big that Jane quits her job. That same afternoon he realizes that he is merely a talking head for corporate sleaze bags. When Globodyne craters, they lose everything, as do all the employees. They resort to criminal capers to survive, and in the end exact recompense from the corrupt executives and restore the lost fortunes of the former Globodyne employees. In a delicious dig, when the credits roll you read a list of people honored for "Special Thanks," then realize that the names are real life corporate criminals—Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Dennis Kozlowski, and so on. But there's the rub. It is somehow sad to see Carrey stuck in sophomoric slapstick, and real-life people who really lost their life savings at Enron or WorldComm probably won't find the movie very funny. This film got uniformly poor reviews, but it still might be worth an evening of light laughs; just don't expect too much.