Quick: Who wants to see a comedy about shoddy airport security? Nobody? Okay: Who wants to see a film where two Air Force jets are “this close” to blowing an airplane out of the sky because it’s carrying a bomb over Miami? Sure, its timing couldn’t be worse, but haven’t we seen Big Trouble before? Even when the film was called Get Shorty it still felt like a reductive Pulp Fiction, which, in turn, looked better when it repackaged itself as Jackie Brown. Henry (Dennis Farina) and Leonard (Jack Kehler) are sent to kill businessman Arthur Herk (Stanley Tucci), whose wife Anna (Rene Russo) and step-daughter Jenny (Zooey Deschanel) are fond of Martha Stewart (played by the family dog in one hallucination sequence). Ex-“Miami Herald” writer Eliot (Tim Allen) has a son, Matt (Ben Foster), who’s fond of the game Killer (think tag with a Squirtmaster 9000). Two F.B.I. agents, two cops, two bungling thieves, one Peruvian housemaid and one Fritos-loving Jesus freak later and Big Trouble has officially become that movie you stop talking to your friends over because they actually thought it was funny. Mediocrity’s a bitch and Big Trouble’s comedic pacing is so off you might think you stepped into a screening of Rat Race once the goats hit Miami International Airport.
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