Smell something? It's the stench of 'Envy'

Friday, April 30, 2004

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

The stillborn Ben Stiller-Jack Black comedy, "Envy," seems sadly emblematic of the state of Hollywood humor today. It has two top stars, a major director (Barry Levinson) and a budget the size of Texas -- and yet it's one extended dog-poop joke.

MOVIE REVIEW

ENVY

DIRECTOR: Barry Levinson

CAST: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Christopher Walken

RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for crude humor

WHERE: Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Kirkland Parkplace, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, Woodinville 12

GRADE: D-

It's the parable of Tim (Stiller) and Nick (Black), two best friends who live on the same suburban street and share similar white-collar jobs in the same factory but have one fundamental difference: Tim is practical and Nick is a hopeless dreamer.

One day, while watching a dog relieve himself, Nick gets the outlandish idea of inventing a spray that makes dog excrement disappear into thin air. But Tim ridicules the idea, and refuses to make an initial $2,000 investment to help Nick fund the efforts of a wacky inventor.

Of course, the stuff works, the invention becomes a worldwide sensation and Nick becomes a billionaire: the Bill Gates of the dog-caca sanitation business. Meanwhile, Tim, realizing he's bungled the opportunity of his life, seethes with envy.

Now, on paper this sounds like a pretty good premise for a comedy. No actor does jealousy better than Stiller, Black is someone you surely could hate for his clueless good luck, and with a director as skilled as Levinson ("Bugsy," "Rain Man") on board, it could work.

But instead of focusing on the comedy of envy, the film goes the other way and concentrates on the scatology. It works a poo-poo reference into every scene. It thinks animal waste is just the funniest thing God ever created. It's obsessed with the stuff.

And while the Farrelly brothers might have made a modest guilty pleasure out of this situation, Levinson has no gift for crude humor. Nothing he tries works, Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.