So, what happens when you take a book by Dave Barry and had it over to Barry Sonnenfeld to direct? Big Trouble. (Ok, sorry, that was a really obvious shot, and I just had to take it, but don't worry, the rest of the review won't be that cheesy... I promise!)

Sonnenfeld is best known for his quirky fare such as "The Addams Family" and "Men in Black", and Barry, for the quirky column he writes for the Miami Herald (I am not making this up!). Put them together and you get a veryquirky movie. But quirky in a really fun way.

The movie, sadly, didn't get much exposure in the theaters because it suffered from horrible timing. It was completed and originally scheduled for release in the fall of 2001, but following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the studio decided to delay the release. This is largely because the climax of the movie takes place in an airport with some seriously lax and moronic security personnel. The fact that many people no longer find humour in the idea of someone carrying a bomb on an airplane has reduced the audience for the film, and it's theatrical run wasn't very successful - but if you can handle that aspect of it, it's really worth a watch.

The basic story is that, though a series of those kind of bizarre events that only happen in a movie, a columnist-turned-ad exec, his teenage son and son's best friend, a female classmate of theirs, her rich, obnoxious father, his bored, Martha-Stewart-obsessed wife, their hot-babe maid, the guy who lives in a tree-house near or on their property (kind of hard to tell there), some Russian weapons dealers, two of Miami's finest, a couple incredibly stupid street thugs, and a slick hit-man and his companion get involved with each other, largely because of a mysterious suitcase, a kid's game of "killer" (in which players are assigned someone to "kill" with a water gun). As I'm sure you can imagine, wackiness ensues.

This isn't a laugh-out-loud side-splitter, but it offers more than the usual amount of amusement, and manages to do so without crossing over into that "just to weird" catagory of the old "Cannonball Run" movies - which I was afraid it would be comperable to. The jokes don't always go for the obvious, and with the exception of a dog's fondness for sniffing crotches, the humour avoids the seemingly obiquitous scatalogical and sexual themes that frequent many of today's comedies.