Starring: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Christopher Walken, Rachel
Weisz
Cert: 12
Tim Dingman (Stiller) and Nick Vanderpark (Black) are neighbours, work
colleagues and life-long best friends. There isn't much that differentiates the
two of them; the homes are identical, they are both happily married and have two
children. Their one major difference is that Nick is a dreamer and Tim is very
practical. This means that whilst nick is constantly dreaming up million-dollar
making endeavours, Tim is concentrating on his work and savings.
Tim blows off Nick's latest scheme to create an aerosol that will cause dog
poo to disappear. However, Nick persists with his idea and, eventually, the
dream becomes a reality and he becomes a multimillionaire. Instead of letting
his new-found wealth go to his head he builds his family a new empire on his old
house - still directly opposite Tim's.
Every day that Tim wakes up he is reminded of his underachieving friend's
lucky break and his own error in judgement. His relationship with his family
becomes strained, he is defensive and angry the entire time, his concentration
at work lapses and, eventually, he is fired.
He goes to a bar to drown his sorrows where he meets with an enthusiastic
vagabond who calls himself J-Man (Walken). After the full details are disclosed,
J-Man sympathises and encourages Tim to 'stir things up a bit'. He does and
accidentally kills Nick's horse.
Tim's desire to try to cover-up the incident leads down a spiralling path of
deceit and further complications until the icing of guilt is laid on top when
Nick asks Tim to become a partner. Now, J-Man wants in and he knows enough to
truly mess things up.
In the background is Nick's wife who wants to run for Senate (or something)
and the building pressure for activists demanding to know, 'Where does all the
poo go?'
A fairly overlooked production from two of the hottest comedy actors on
the film circuit. I'm not sure whether marketing presumed their names would
carry the film alone or bad word-of-mouth scuppered their release plans.
There's not much going on in the way of originality here. Stiller is
conservative and uptight whilst Black is hyper and ditzy - perfect opposites to
play off one another, perfect characters for anyone who knows anything about the
actors to empathise with immediately but ultimately not offering any great
substance in their performances. They both cruise along in neutral but, in that,
are doing what they are both do best.
The plot is pretty contrived as well. It rarely offers any surprises and, in
fact, holds back from what your expectations might be. Tim doesn't get himself
into quite the same degree of unintentional trouble as Greg Focker would even
though he seems to be just a carbon copy.
However, as is usual for these type of vehicles, the real shining element
comes from the secondary characters and, again, Christopher Walken shows he is
equally adept at playing the funny freaks as well as the creepy freaks.
Rachel Weisz also has a fairly decent role as Tim's
sensible-but-yearning-for-the-good-life wife and presents, perhaps, the flavour
of novelty as, instead of admonishing her bumbling husband, she actually
encourages him to keep quiet and cover up his errors.
Certainly not a bad film but not one that will be marked in the annals of
time as a high-light of each man's careers. Sit back, enjoy and, if you're
lucky, have a few out-loud laughs. Tomorrow, forget about it.
Special Features
To make it even less enticing, there are none. Not
even a gag reel which, you would imagine could host a feature equal in length to
the main with the amount of ad-libbing Black and Stiller probably got up to.
But maybe none of it was very funny.
