Fun With Dick and Jane (2005): A Remake Built for Its Moment — And a Reminder About Ours
When Fun with Dick and Jane was remade in 2005, it wasn’t trying to honor the 1970 George Segal cult classic. It wasn’t trying to recreate its charm or its tone. It was trying to speak to its own time — a moment when Enron, corporate bailouts, and financial scandals were splashed across every screen in America. The movie wasn’t subtle about it either. It leaned straight into the chaos of a system wobbling under the weight of greed, mismanagement, and the strange belief that government and business should be tangled together like vines. And here’s the part that stings a little: We elected the people who oversaw those systems. We trusted them. We wanted “civil government involved in business government,” and the results weren’t pretty. The film plays with that idea — not deeply, not philosophically, but loudly. It’s a comedy, sure, but underneath the jokes is a world where species-on-species crime is happening every day. People hurting people. People stealing from people. And th...
