Hollywood.com - Post-Sept. 11, will audiences derive much humor from the ordered shooting down of a small civilian airliner?That's the huge stumbling block facing director Barry Sonnenfeld's Big Trouble, a black comedy based on the best-selling novel by humorist Dave Barry.
Touchstone wisely yanked Big Trouble from its Sept. 21 release following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. The Miami-set ensemble farce, headlined by Tim Allen and Rene Russo, revolves around a nuclear bomb that ends up in the grubby hands of unsuspecting smalltime crooks Tom Sizemore and Johnny Knoxville.
Seven months later, though, Big Trouble remains a risky prospect. Its tricky final act--decidedly unfunny pre- and post-Sept. 11--will certainly alienate audiences in the wake of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks.
Not that Big Trouble has much going for it to begin with, considering it is unsurprisingly flat and visually unexciting for a comedy from the director of The Addams Family and Men In Black. Big Trouble's meager laughs come from the nefarious antics of harried co-stars Stanley Tucci and Dennis Farina and Barry's dead-on observations about life in southern Florida.
Accordingly, Big Trouble will likely earn less than half of the $12.7 million that Sonnenfeld's last crime caper, the cool-as-ice Get Shorty, opened with in 1995.
That's bad news for the major principals involved.
Sonnenfeld is coming off the overblown Wild Wild West, which earned a disappointing $113.8 million for a high-priced Will Smith vehicle. No one paid much attention to Allen's Joe Somebody ($22.7 million). The lights are fading fast on Russo's Showtime, the Robert De Niro/Eddie Murphy cop comedy that has made a lousy $34.4 million through Wednesday.
Don't feel too bad, though. Sonnenfeld should bounce back this summer with Men In Black II. Allen has The Santa Clause 2: Mrs. Clause scheduled for Nov. 8.
With Big Trouble unlikely to cause much of a stir, High Crimes should emerge as the top choice among this weekend's new release.
A military courtroom thriller directed by One False Move's Carl Franklin, High Crimes reunites Kiss the Girls stars Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. Law professor Judd enlists Freeman to help her defend her husband, Jim Caviezel, on trial for his alleged role in a mass killing in El Salvador.
Audiences seem to like Judd better when she's fighting off serial killers and murderous husbands. Kiss the Girls earned $60.5 million, while Double Jeopardy became a $116.7 million smash. Judd's subsequent forays into drama (Where the Heart Is, $33.7 million) and comedy (Someone Like You, $27.3 million) aroused little interest, in comparison.
Freeman reprised his role as Alex Cross in last year's Kiss the Girls prequel, Along Came a Spider, which managed to make $74 million even without Judd's presence.
High Crimes arrives without much fanfare, considering it pairs Freeman with Judd. It also doesn't help that High Crimes is sandwiched between two other thrillers featuring tough women, Jodie Foster's Panic Room and Sandra Bullock's Murder By Numbers, due April 19. That could result in High Crimes struggling to match Kiss the Girls' $13.2 million opening.