Photo Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures Jason Lee and Sofia Vergara think about what "Big Trouble" they will be in this weekend. The movie opens today and also stars Tim Allen, Janeane Garafalo and, from MTV's JACKASS, Johnny Knoxville.

The opening line of Tim Allen's voiceover in "Big Trouble" - "Sometimes a bomb drops into our lives" - foreshadows not only the plot of the movie but the experience of watching it.

But there's no reason to be too hasty with the criticism just yet. The novel on which the film was based was written by Dave Barry, everyone's favorite syndicated columnist. He's funny, right? At the very least, he can write.

And Barry's light-hearted-yet-slightly-wicked commentary probably would have made it into this film had he written the script, produced and directed it. Unfortunately, though, he didn't do any of those things and probably wasn't allowed on the set to plead with director Barry Sonnenfeld ("Men in Black," "Wild Wild West") not to make the movie too stupid.

But, hey, maybe Barry liked the movie.

"Big Trouble" is like a huge radioactive plot-monster that ate a bunch of famous actors. That's supposed to be funny, but it may well have been one of the original ideas for a tagline. This is just the type of movie that would be proud of being kind of crappy.

The concept behind "Big Trouble" is that a large number of oblivious people get pulled into a senselessly complicated plot. This is not, in itself, a bad idea. The Coen brothers pulled it off phenomenally with "The Big Lebowski."

But the closest Joel and Ethan ever got to "Big Trouble" was that Sonnenfeld was the cinematographer for some of their early movies (before they got someone good).

All right, enough avoiding the inevitable description of the plot. Eliot Arnold (Tim Allen) is just a regular guy whose desperate attempt to console himself after a financially crippling divorce culminates in the purchase of a bright yellow Geo. His son hates him, he loses his job, and he's becoming increasingly convinced that his happy-go-lucky attitude is in fact making him into more of a loser.

He and more than a dozen other people - from hit men, to a guy who lives in trees, to children, to police officers, to a goat - get into relatively big trouble. Together. They share, of course, one thing: They are all zany.

Really, everyone in the movie is a goofball. Usually, there are one or two silly, slapsticky characters to provide good, clean comic relief. But literally, everyone in this movie is like that. And that's kind of interesting.

But anyway, they all get into this enormous mess because one of them got fired and wants some kind of large-scale, violent revenge, which is why the movie's original opening date, Sept. 14, was pushed back to today.

"Big Trouble" has a lot of dorkiness, some sex, a little light violence and skin-deep, sitcom-style family values. People will like it. They'll relate to the characters, laugh at them at the appropriate times, feel better when everything gets wrapped up at the end, leave the theater saying to each other, "That was good," and forget the whole thing right away.