Barry Sonnenfeld’s Best Bomb
As hundreds of mysterious SUV-sized drones with red and green flashing lights (Christmas!) circle and hover over the East coast, many people are asking, is there a dirty bomb on the loose? Should we be concerned? Another “trending topic”: Project Blue Beam, an alleged atmospheric light show made to look interstellar, sending messages and wild images to individuals in the guise of aliens or religious figures, for the purposes of ushering in a new world religion and inaugurating the New World Order with holograms and false promises from the Antichrist. Very woo-woo… but X, the everything app, formerly Twitter (I still call it Twitter), has a lot of stuff on Project Blue Beam, and who am I to refuse? It’s not as if I’m going to start making tinfoil hats. It’s all part of “the show.” I just watched the 1978 turgid tearjerker Ice Castles and I can’t stop thinking about the Christmas-colored drones in the sky and the non-zero possibility that there’s a nuke about to go off somewhere on the East Coast.
Even if I hadn’t just read his two memoirs—Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother and Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time—the news of the past couple of days would’ve reminded me of Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble. Based on Dave Barry’s 1999 novel, Big Trouble was scheduled for release on September 21, 2001, but, like so many others, was pulled from release calendars because of unfortunate similarities to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Many movies were affected by this, and many were altered, inexplicably removing the Twin Towers from films show before September 11, erasing what would’ve been the final images of the World Trade Center on film. Zoolander is one of those films missing the Towers; Cameron Crowe insisted he keep them for Vanilla Sky. Neither of them missed their fall 2001 release dates.
Big Trouble did, despite being set entirely in Miami. Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler have been hired to assassinate Stanley Tucci, father of Zooey Deschanel and husband of Rene Russo; Deschanel’s classmates Ben Foster and DJ Qualls inadvertently interrupt the assassination by pranking Deschanel, leaving a bullet in a TV and cops Janeane Garofalo and Patrick Warburton on the scene. Tim Allen’s ostensibly the star of this movie, but after delivering some voice over in some early scenes in which he appears, he’s missing in action for most of the movie. Somehow, a nuclear bomb gets onto an airplane and everyone heads to the airport.
FBI agents, a hippy who loves Fritos who Sofia Vergara thinks is Jesus Christ (Jason Lee), goats and gators… a very wacky comedy set to non-stop wacky, lampshade on your head music, the very kind that Sonnenfeld rails against in his interviews and books. This is bootleg Elmore Leonard, with a good cast of characters with little to do but wail and wave their arms.
But it’s not an unwatchable failure like Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West. I saw both of these movies when they came out, but the promotion was miles apart: you couldn’t escape Wild Wild West in New York City when it came out in 1999. Even as a six-year-old I knew I was being ripped off and let down by the actual movie, but I liked the tie-ins. I remember a very elaborate Burger King display… Big Trouble was dumped into one of the screens at the United Artists Union Square 14 in April 2002, and I saw it with my mom and brother. We went to Toys ‘R’ Us afterwards and didn’t get anything. It was already dark. The zany comedy would run its course for a few more years, but by 2003 a new wave—the last wave?—of comedy had arrived in Hollywood. There would be many more cameras, many more takes, and far fewer set pieces and stunts. No wonder Sonnenfeld regards Big Trouble as one of his best movies: it’s a perfectly made product of its time, already obsolete upon release.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith