Envy

The reviews of this one were so abysmal that we’d never have rented it if we weren’t subscribing to the Hollywood Video MVP program, where you get unlimited rentals for $10/month. If it sucks, you’ve only wasted the 30 minutes or so it take to decide it’s a turkey. (Movie freaks, check that one out!) So we were surprised to be laughing. Jack Black makes a spray that makes dog shit vanish. Ben Stiller misses his chance to invest. Black gets very, very rich, Ben gets very, very envious. Complication ensue. I’m not saying it’s great, or even that it is real good. Many opportunities are missed. (I kept waiting for all that missing shit to come back in some comic way, according to the little-known Newton’s Law of the Conservation of Excrement; i.e., shit can be created but never destroyed.) It gets pretty dumb in places. Still, I’ve bailed out of comedies that were a lot worse than this one.