The Film Yap

Movies You Aught Not Watch is Nick Rogers’ weekly, alphabetical look back at the 52 worst films of 2000-2009.

“Fun with Dick and Jane”
Rated PG-13
2005

Each year, America seems to push at least one film to $100 million or more in a collective cinematic fugue — movies not necessarily bad, but so unremarkable that, as they air at 1 a.m. on USA or Spike, people will be unable to recall seeing them, let alone the plots or conscious decisions to leave the house.

Exhibit A: The $110-million gross of the 2005 remake of “Fun with Dick and Jane,” easily the most embarrassing project to which Judd Apatow has offered his screenwriting pen. This corporate-greed satire doesn’t just lack bite. (Look! Everyone has the same Beamer!) It lacks gnaw. It even lacks nibble.

Consider it a signed confession of remake rape when a “produced by Jim Carrey” credit appears atop his noodle-limbed exaggeration of “I Believe I Can Fly.”

He’s Dick, a newly appointed corporate stooge who loses his shirt after unfairly taking the fall for his company’s bankruptcy. Deploying her usual overbearing-shrew shtick, Tea Leoni is Jane, his wife, and there’s more marital bonding in the credits of “The Jetsons” than in this film.

Dick and Jane turn to robbery — the spoils seemingly going toward gender-bending getups. A heist finale attempts to validate these vainglorious bastards when we’d rather see their kid raised by the maid (the only Latin not denigrated by an illegal-alien detour insultingly played for wackiness).

Thoroughly offensive to the point where even a soundtrack snippet from Johnny Cash, who knew true poverty, rankles, you’ll want to be done with Dick and Jane.