Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni play a couple of yuppies reduced to armed robbery to fund their lavish lifestyle in Fun With Dick And Jane. The pairing of two gifted comedy actors had us anticipating a barrel of laughs, but instead this comedy remake scrapes the bottom. Director Dean Parisot "consistently misses the mark," but that didn’t stop moviegoers shelling out to the tune of $110m.

See Dick Run

Carrey does his shtick in a three-and-a-half-minute reel of junket highlights. He sums up the film as "Taking it to the white collar creep and showing them what it’s like to get reamed, baby!" which could just as well describe his regard of unsuspecting moviegoers paying the price of admission... Leoni gets in on the act too, always "willing to jump into the comedy chasm" with JC and then jumps his bones to prove it. There’s more goofing around in a short gag reel, but this time Carrey ends up playing sucky-face with comedy fat guy Jeff Garlin (as his hostage).

Dick and Jane embark on a robbing spree throughout six deleted scenes that perfectly exemplify the desperation of the scriptwriters. The humour is basically derived from lots of kicking and punching, like a sequence where Carrey gets pummelled by an OAP ex-Marine security guard and another that sees Leoni teaching a class her own offshoot of Tae-Bo (called "Kung Po") and sparking a full-scale riot.

Stand And Deliver

Co-writers Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller attempt to justify their efforts in the commentary, but ultimately fail. Still, the track turns out to be more engaging than the movie. Apatow claims to be a big fan of the original 1977 film, because "Jane Fonda wipes herself on the toilet", but mostly it was the Enron scandal that got the cogs turning for this remake. Dean Parisot reflects on a predicament that faced many Americans in the wake of the company’s collapse and notes that "tragedy and comedy walk hand in hand".

The director also talks about casting Tea Leoni on the strength of her performance in Flirting With Disaster and in auditions found that "she could go in any direction with Jim". There isn’t much on the technical ins-and-outs of production except a bizarre admission that the production designer used the colours on a 20 dollar bill to provide the palette for the yuppie neighbourhood.

While the commentary is fairly good, the extras package is woefully thin as a whole. Like the titular robbers, this DVD gets away with very little swag.

EXTRA FEATURES
DISC ONE