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Big Trouble is most remembered for having its release postponed just after 9/11. A comedy whereupon a nuclear bomb somehow gets on board a plane was only going to end up drawing the wrong kind of attention. It was not looked upon kindly, which might explain why during its eventual release in April 2002 no one went to see it.

The recently divorced Eliot Arnold (Tim Allen) is struggling in advertising after losing his job writing for the Miami Herald. His son Matt (Ben Foster) has more free time to play the silly high school game of Killer, which involves him having to squirt his target, fellow schoolgirl Jenny (Zooey Deschannel), with a water gun. Jenny's dad Arthur (Stanley Tucci) is also a target, but the ones assassinating him are two professional hitmen, Henry (Dennis Farina) and Leonard (Jack Kehler); hired to kill Arthur after he embezzled money from his company. Arthur is married to Anna (Rene Russo), but wants to do things to the toes of their Mexican housemaid Nina (Sofia Vergara). However, she has a thing for the homeless, Frito-loving wanderer Pudgy (Jason Lee), who has just arrived in Miami and bagged a job helping Russians move some weapons at their hideout, which moonlights as a bar. Two idiotic ex-convicts, Snake (Tom Sizemore) and Eddie (Johnny Knoxville), who have been banned from their bar, decide to get revenge by robbing it, as well as taking a big shiny suitcase, unaware that it contains a nuclear bomb that the Russians were in the process of selling. Amid all this are two police officers, Walter (Patrick Warburton) and Monica (Janeane Garofalo), who frequently find themselves in the presence of these characters.

Big Trouble is an adaptation of Dave Barry's novel of the same name. Barry, like Tim Allen's character Eliot, also used to write for the Miami Herald. Barry appeared to have laid a golden egg with his debut novel, so when it came to the big screen version, director Barry Sonnenfeld decided to have a crack at it, while screenwriters Robert Ramset and Matthew Stone scrambled it up. Basically, what might have worked well on the page has transated into a lack of laughs on screen. Some witty lines hit the spot but most will likely induce no reaction at all. A running gag on Martha Stewart and a dog that likes sniffing the crotch area raises the occasional smile. However it just gets stupidly weird when the film blends the two together.

The majority of Sonnenfeld's work usually clocks in at around the 90-minute mark, because that is supposedly the length of fun. At 85 minutes, Big Trouble is the shortest film he's directed, and given the great cast assembled, there are just too many characters to try and flesh out in such a short space of time. And so it doesn't, leaving some unfortunately wasted.
Tim Allen works rather well as a comedic writer who suddenly turns into an action man before the film is over. His (essential) narration makes the film look like a wannabee crime story. Dennis Farina as Henry is essentially playing the toned down version of his Ray Barboni from Get Shorty (with shades of his character Avi from Snatch). Towards the second half the look on Barboni's face is absolutely classic as he becomes less serious and only more disturbed by Miami. Janeane Garofalo deserves praise for playing it straight as a hard-edged cop, resulting in almost everything she says and does being excellent, while Zooey Deschanel as Jenny gets to perfect her deadpan comedy. Jack Kehler as one half of the hitmen duo, Leonard, is merely weak comic relief who doesn't seem to do anything except bounce off whatever crazy thoughts Henry puts across. Also, it's amazing that Rene Russo received second billing considering just how little she does, in what is essentially ‘obligatory-mother-character.'
Dave Barry's intention appears to be to depict damn near everyone in Miami as an idiot, with the possible ulterior motive being to stop people from going to Miami altogether. Making most of your cast look stupid is something Sonnenfeld happens to be very good at (and achieved to full effect in Men in Black II), which might explain why he was drawn to Big Trouble.
A lot of the jokes here rely on the viewer accepting that "almost" everyone (it doesn't matter if they're minor or major characters) is a bit of a dimwit. With some characters, such as the ex-convicts Snake and Eddie, it goes without saying, and that they manage to get as far as they do only comes about because of the equal amount of stupidity they encounter. The most notable example is the portrayal of lax security checkers at an airport, dumb enough to allow a handgun and bomb on board a plane, which now has major resonance for all the wrong reasons. Most unusually, it portrays the smartest people as those that watch TV, except their knowledge extends to unnecessary tat. Henry knows a lot about the female mosquito from watching the Discovery Channel and FBI Agent Seitz (a small but notable role by Omar Epps) has been checking out beautiful churches from the Travel Channel.

Big Trouble is essentially a collection of outrageous scenarios too absurd to be real, compacted into an incredibly short running time. That they all just so happen to be intertwined with each other is stuff that movie reviewers really enjoy. The problem here is that it suffers from being too ridiculous to even take the humor humorously. I've seen half hour sitcoms that are funnier.

Verdict: NOT with us.