Why does Hollywood continue to remake films that are in no way clamoring to be remade? This is just the the latest 're-imagining' of a 'comedy' from the 1970's that never registered with audiences to begin with. The original Fun with Dick and Jane with George Segal and Jane Fonda, I must admit, I do not remember at all. I was maybe ten when if first came out, and when it premiered on cable most of it was over my head for a sophisticated farce about a middle-class couple facing life from another angle when the corporate ladder hubby has been scaling shakes him free from his ascent to financial security.

In this toothless 21st century attempt to shock the system, Dick Harper (a sadly underused Jim Carrey) is a VP wannabe of an Enron-like conglomerate that is on the verge of financial ruin and federal indictments aplenty when its CEO Jack McCallister (a slimily bearded Alec Baldwin) absconds with its pension plans for his own personal gains.While he escapes on the company helicopter, Dick is publicly humiliated and left as the investors' patsy.  

Dick's downward spiral continues as his wife Jane (Tea Leoni, ditto the comments of her costar) attempts to maneuver their assets even if it means paying their housekeeper in appliances when the money finally does run out. What could have been a clever skewering of the new millenium's blight of corporate thievery and deceit instead comes across as a slap-happy sitcom-sized rejoinder to the rat race with the indisposed couple resorting to stick-up jobs at the local mini-mart with all paths eventually leading back to the man responsible for their plight.

Carrey and Leoni make the most of the slight screenplay by Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller and Peter Tolan and Dean Parisot's ham-fisted direction but ultimately the story is rather beleaguered and the send-off ending feels tacked on. Too bad the comedy that could've been, the one about sticking it to THE MAN, never comes to fruition.