Dick and Jane (Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni) were the very couple most people think about when they think "American." They were white, working, married with one kid, a dog, a BMW, and a house in the suburbs. Even their names were all-American. All they were missing was a picket fence. Their cookie cutter world came crashing down around them when Jane quit her job and Dick's company, Globodyne, went belly up. They were reduced to selling all of their worldly possessions, they even had to pay their child's nanny in small appliances.

When the bank came after their house, they drew a line in the sand. They would liquidate no more. It was time to get criminal.

"Fun with Dick and Jane" was plenty funny. I never knew the word "indicted" could be so hilarious. I suppose that's what happens when a failing company slaps a VP label on a guy and puts him in front of a television audience to field questions about a bogus earnings report. Jim Carrey was gold and Tea Leoni held her own. It was definitely fun with Dick and Jane.

It's the year 2000. Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane Harper (Téa Leoni) are an upwardly mobile suburban couple keeping up with the Joneses. Dick gets a big promotion to be the VP of Communications. Jane quits her frustrating job. Then the company implodes after the CEO Jack McCallister (Alec Baldwin) escapes with the golden parachute. Dick finds himself jobless, and financially stuck with worthless company stock. As the family struggles, Dick and Jane fall into armed robbery.

This tries to tie itself to the modern sense of disenfranchising corporate greed. This story is ready for the update. Putting it back five years does take a little steam out of the movie. The pervasive bitter tone clashes with Carrey's wild-man comedy style. This probably would work much better as a dark unfunny version. Laughs are too hard for this material. It hits too close to home.

The storyline of "Fun Wih Dick and Jane" is excellent: "executive loses his job; unemployed and without means of maintaining the lifestyle of his family, his wife and he become thieves, and later they decide to steal his former boss". In 1977, Ted Kotcheff, with George Segal and Jane Fonda, directed a great movie.

This 2005 remake is an unsuccessful trial of updating the almost classic movie that became very silly and ridiculous. Jim Carrey simply destroyed Dick Harper, transforming the successful executive engineer of the original story in a stupid, envious and hysterical clown. Tea Leoni did the same with Jane, who was an elegant woman from an aristocratic family that had never worked in the original movie, in a simple stressed clerk that hates her job. The slow construction of the desperate situation of the Harper family of the first movie becomes a caricature in the "updated" version. Last but not the least, the sharp critic to the American Dream, satirizing the hypocrite need of maintaining a status, and also to the corruption related to the big business of the corporations of the first movie simply vanish in this foolish remake. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "As Loucuras de Dick e Jane" ("The Crazy Things of Dick and Jane")