YMMV / Big Fat Liar

• Accidental Aesop:
  • While the film's broader message is against telling lies, the other message of the movie seems to be "don't be a dick to the people you work with". Marty's worst habits aren't just his pathological lying, but the fact that he mistreats his employees for no good reason but to be mean. He even does this knowing his career is hanging by a thread and his superior doesn't care for him. Despite Jason only asking for Marty to make a single private confession to his father, and aware of the torments Jason has inflicted on him, he betrays Jason and has him sent off. This is what drives his own secretary to turn on him, along with the rest of his employees.
  • Marty Wolf seems to embody the worst aspects of toxic masculinity. On top of mistreating his employees, he feels the need to show dominance and control in every situation. He destroys the career of an aspiring actor over a minor request, constantly ignores the advice of his staff, taunts and mocks a temperamental truck driver, and refuses to even send Jason's father a private confession because of his need to feel significant and in control, only to alienate and enrage a lot of people. If Wolf had learned to be more humble and less macho, he wouldn't have made so many people hate him.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • Telling little white lies to get out of trouble is wrong, but plagiarism is unforgivable.
  • Don't take your parents' trust for granted. While Jason getting sent to summer school wasn't fair, had he not been a compulsive liar in the past, he wouldn't have been in so deep with his parents and teacher.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • At the end, Grandma Pearl attends the premiere along with Bret at the end. Did she realize that Bret wasn't Kaylee but still bonded with him due to their shared passion for fitness and exercise? It's mentioned early in the film that she was a bit senile and blind, but she did touch Bret's legs while training, so she may have deduced that those legs weren't those of his granddaughter.
  • Is Monty's Big Eater quirk just that or a coping mechanism she developed from having to endure her boss' outrageous behavior?
• Anvilicious: Lying is bad.
• Catharsis Factor: Pretty much anytime Marty suffers is a fun moment for the audience.
• Cargo Ship: Marty is...oddly attached to his stuffed monkey Mr. Funnybones.
• Critical Dissonance: The film received mixed reviews from critics, earning a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 36/100 on Metacritic, but was a box office success, earning $53 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. It also surprisingly got a "two thumbs up" from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper on their show.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Kaylee pretending the dog-lover secretary's car is parked on a dog's tail.
• Designated Hero: Wolf is undoubtedly a self-centered Jerkass who deserves to be punished and exposed, and the way he treats everyone ranked below him wouldn't exactly make him look credible in front of a justice, no matter how justified his litigation against Jason would be. That said, Jason is still a pathological liar who constantly gets other people in trouble or causes them distress, and even some of his pranks against Wolf verge into actually putting lives in danger. The only difference between the two is that Jason wants to stop lying before it catches up to him while Wolf isn't bothered in the least.
• Ham and Cheese: Paul Giamatti absolutely loses his shit in this movie, and it's glorious.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Lee Majors' appearance as the aging stunt director Vince, a reference to his former role as Colt Seavers on The Fall Guy, is this given that the creator and executive producer of The Fall Guy, Glen A. Larson, was himself actually accused of plagiarism by actor James Garner, in which Garner wrote in his autobiography that Larson stole a number of ideas from The Rockford Files, which Garner starred in and co-produced through his production company, Cherokee Productions, and used them for his own shows, putting different characters in them, and continued to do so even though Garner complained to the Writers' Guild of America and the WGA subsequently fined Larson, even copying The Rockford Files's own theme song for one of his shows.
  • One of the deleted scenes shows Marty asking a female extra to put on a bikini in a very creepy manner. This became a lot less funny in 2017, the film's fifteenth anniversary no less, when numerous people accused sleazy Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of invoking the Casting Couch to take advantage of women in a sexual manner.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Wolf getting dyed completely blue, which in 2010, might make some people wonder if Jason and Kaylee were going for a smurfy cat look...
  • The movie within a movie at the very end features an oversized Donald Faison, a.k.a. "World's Most Giant Black Doctor".
• Love to Hate: Marty is an abusive Jerkass, but his over-the-top nature and the torment he suffers at the hands of Jason is really fun to watch.
• Moral Event Horizon: Marty finally crosses this line when he once again refuses to confess his misdeed to Jason's father. And this was after Jason helped him market Big Fat Liar to Marty's boss. This is the moment where even Marty's secretary turns on him.
• Sequelitis: The Direct to Video sequel from 2017 after 15 years was both a critical & commercial failure and fans who enjoyed the 2002 film pretended Bigger Fatter Liar never exist.
• Signature Scene: Paul Giamatti turned blue in this movie.
• Special Effects Failure: When Marty jumps into the pool, not knowing it's been filled with blue dye. If you pause at the right time, he turns blue before he even touches the pool. This shows that they just slapped a blue filter on the camera during that moment.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Jason may have somewhat deserved it, but getting sent to summer school because someone stole his homework is a bit unfair.
  • Jason is profoundly hurt and haunted when his father sadly tells him he can't believe anything he says and he fears his dad doesn't love him. Any kid in trouble with their parents can relate to that moment.
• Trailer Joke Decay: The tow truck driver's line: "They told me to pick up a little blue car. They didn't say anything about a little blue man!" There was absolutely no trailer or TV spot for the film in which the scene didn't appear.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: What is supposed to be a Frankie Muniz kid comedy seems to be a scathing indictment of the entertainment industry and how many of its leaders are abusive dicks to their employees.

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