12A, 90mins
For a persuasive demonstration of why so many people find Jim Carrey resistible, look no further than Fun With Dick and Jane. This remake of an undistinguished 1977 crime caper allows Carrey to unleash his full gamut of tics and gurning. In demented slapstick mode he’s like a creepy overgrown child in the throes of a sugar rush — perfect attributes for playing a man possessed by the frenetic spirit of an ancient mask, but less appropriate when the character is an everyman husband and father. Here he’s a wage slave whose long years of loyalty to Globodyne, a media company, are about to go up in smoke thanks to a case of corporate malfeasance.
Carrey’s Dick Harper is a demented freak show of a character; although he coaxes a fair few laughs from the material, he’s almost impossible to like.
Téa Leoni plays Dick’s wife, Jane. The pair briefly flirt with criminal life to keep up solvent suburban appearances. But the real criminals are the fat cats who creamed off hundreds of millions from company accounts before the business went bust. So D&J set up an elaborate sting to redistribute the wealth to the workers. That’s Carrey (reported fee per film: $25 million) playing a champion of the common man. The whole film is as fraudulent as an offshore tax haven full of corrupt CEOs.