Soup kitchen and lost pension jokes? HEE-larious!: "Fun with Dick and Jane"

Maybe it's just me, but Jim Carrey could stand to loosen up a bit.

Kidding, kidding. Fear not ... we don't get another ill-fated dramatic turn, a la "The Majestic." True, I never saw that classic from a few years back, but neither did anyone, apparently. And lucky for us, Carrey bounced back with the one-two punch of "Bruce Almighty" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and I guess I usually give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to mindless fun. Hey, you know how I feel about "The Cable Guy."

"Fun with Dick and Jane" qualified as something both My Forever Love and I could see together over the holidays. I wasn't dragging her to "King Kong," and there was a better chance of me getting an eyebrow wax than seeing "Memoirs of a Geisha." So we took in Carrey and Tea "Mrs. Duchovny" Leoni as a suburban couple who eventually turn to crime after Dick's bigtime corporate job goes kablooey, sending their lives down the crapper.

It's such a funny idea it's already been done once, back in the '70s. Here, the story is updated for the Enron/Worldcom era, in which Carrey's boss fleeces employees and sends the company into bankruptcy. Alec "Pete Schweddy" Baldwin ("Mercury Rising") plays the good ole boy boss, and he's amusing as usual. Isn't it great how he's given up being a lead actor? Seriously, even though he gets plenty of work and got nominated for an Oscar last year, it's been several years since you could call something "an Alec Baldwin movie." Do you think he regrets not keeping the Jack Ryan role after "The Hunt for Red October?"

But back to Carrey and Leoni, both of whom are game for all sorts of slapstick in "Dick and Jane." No quibbles with their performances, nor with others; along with Baldwin, we get Richard "Six Feet Under" Jenkins as a crooked CFO and one of my personal faves, Carlos Jacott, as Carrey's corporate colleague. You may know him as Ramon, the pool guy, from "Seinfeld." I know! That guy's great!

No, all the actors are trying here. It's the general story that falls a little short. Despite some funny scenes and a few good throwaway lines, I found the overall order of events to be odd. Maybe it was because the overall concept was a little thin -- topical, yes, but thin -- but it seemed to take a long time for the Harpers to go from riches to rags, and some of that wasn't so funny.

At a time when the economy really isn't so hot and highly-qualified people are struggling to find jobs, some of the Harpers' plight might have been a little too on-target. That's fine in other movies, but the occasional bits of poignancy didn't work so well here. I wanted to see more about the family getting everything back through robbery, since that part of the movie seems glossed over. I could be overanalyzing this -- hey, it's Jim Carrey -- but "Dick and Jane" might have been better as a more biting satire, a la "Office Space," instead of a mix of the zany and the sappy, including the ending.

In the end, the movie certainly is watchable and more than fit the bill for a long holiday weekend. It just didn't deliver on what could have been a sharper, more biting take on the consequences of today's corporate malfeasance. Now if Carrey had bent over and talked out of his butt ...