Ben Stiller and Jack Black star as a couple of middle class guys. They are best friends and live across the street from each other. Every day they kiss their families goodbye and carpool together to the local 3M plant where they work. Tim Dingman (Stiller) is the hard working guy with no imagination or dreams. Nick Vanderpark (Black) is the goof off with tons of dreams and an endless stream of crazy ideas for products. Tim is long in the habit of pointing out the flaws in the ideas and putting them down. But one day Nick comes up with a truly good idea, a spray that causes dog poop to disappear. Tim puts it down as always but Nick knows he's on to something with this idea. He finds a scientist to help him make it work and invites Tim to invest on the ground floor. Naturally, he declines. Nick and the scientist proceed to make the spray actually work and the next thing you know, Nick is filthy stinking rich.
Nick doesn't move, instead building a giant mansion where his old house was. He buys a horse, a merry-go-round and all manner of hideously expensive toys to fill his front lawn. Tim and family watch all this in horror from across the street. They are beginning to tear apart at having missed the big time by not investing. Pretty soon his wife leaves him and he loses his job after blowing up at the boss.
The idea for this film is certainly a good one. I think everyone can identify with the feeling of having just missed out on a great opportunity that proves golden. But the movie never seems to know what to do with the idea. In desperation it does what all bad movies do when they need a shot in the arm, they turn to Christopher Walken. Walken appears as a loopy bum calling himself the J-Man. He does the patented Walken thing and actually manages to briefly inject some life into the picture. Unfortunately, he's an oasis of entertainment in a desert of tedium. Nobody knows what to do with Walken either, so it's like he wandered in from a completely different movie and nobody had the heart to tell him. Eventually the movie runs out of excuses to use the J-Man and then completely collapses.
The biggest problem here is that the movie takes almost no time to introduce the main characters. The thrust of the storyline is on us so fast we have no chance to get to know the characters and see how they interact. The wives of these men in particular are badly underwritten and so when they come into larger play in the plot later on, they feel tacked on. Stiller and Black are very funny guys but they aren't given a chance to develop chemistry before setting off on the story. So for a lot of the movie, they don't really spend all that much time together and when they do, we don't have a reference point to tell us how their relationship is changed by Black's sudden success.
The wasted talent on this is almost tragic. Director Barry Levinson has much better movies in his resume like Wag the Dog or the almost completely unseen An Everlasting Piece. Here he shows almost no proper instincts for comedy or tragedy. The movie stumbles from scene to scene like drunken college students bar-hopping. Both Black and Stiller seem right for their respective roles, unfortunately the script fails to give them anything much to do with those roles.
This turkey has apparently been sitting on the shelf for some time now. That makes me wonder what possessed them to release it now or ever for that matter.
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