"Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb & Dumber"

 1994 was the year of Jim Carrey, the year he had three hit movies, all of which were successful enough to have sequels and Saturday morning cartoon spinoffs.  I saw and really enjoyed "The Mask," but I never watched the other two movies that made Carrey a star: "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb & Dumber."  So, I thought it was time to correct this and take a stroll through nostalgia land.

It's not that I avoided these two movies.  I was a teenager when they came out and had the opportunity to see them.  However, from what I'd seen of the ads and clips, "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber" featured the kind of juvenile humor that I associated with Adam Sandler, Pauly Shore and Jim Varney movies, which weren't really for me.  It also didn't help that for the longest time, I thought that both "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber" were directed by the Farrelly brothers, whose subsequent movies never impressed me much.  Well, except "Fever Pitch."    

Frankly, my instincts were correct.  "Dumb & Dumber" is one of the hardest watches I've ever sat through.  It's one of the movies that popularized the kind of moronic gross out humor that plagued the comedy genre for the next two decades, and still rears its head occasionally.  The movie is literally two hours of grown men acting like six year-old boys.  There's a lot of eye-rolling toilet humor, a lot of screaming, and a lot of casual crassness that never quite becomes profane.  Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas and Jeff Daniels as Harry Dunne are the ne plus ultra idiot manchildren.  They can put on a front of normalcy, but their natural state is one of embracing the male id with everything they've got.    

It's kind of impressive how relentlessly, aggressively awful Harry and Lloyd are.  The Farrellys are not artless in their puerility.  Some sequences, like the makeover montage, are actually pretty enjoyable for their subversiveness.  And I have to give Carrey and Daniels their props for committing so hard to such physically demanding roles.  They're constantly bouncing around the screen, wrestling and crashing into things, and performing endless pratfalls.  Alas, I couldn't enjoy much of it.  Mostly, I just cringed and waited out the clock, glad that this wasn't an R-rated film like "There's Something About Mary."  if this had been the first Jim Carrey movie I'd seen, it would have taken me a long time to get over it.      

"Ace Ventura" isn't really to my taste either, but I found it much more watchable and entertaining.  Jim Carrey is obnoxious in the title role, but he's dialed way, way down from "Dumb & Dumber," and occasionally shows signs of the genial charm that would help him transition into dramatic roles a few years later.  Ace Venture is socially graceless, but he's intelligent and he's good at what he does.  Even though "Dumb & Dumber" and "Ace Ventura" have the same content rating, "Ace Ventura" is far tamer and less malicious.  The humor is silly more than gross, with the unfortunate exception of the ending, which involves an extended transsexual panic joke that has aged badly enough that it's pretty wretchedly offensive now. 

 

It's in "Ace Ventura" that Carrey really distinguishes his brand of physical humor.  He's able to turn himself into a cartoon character with his wildly exaggerated facial expressions and willingness to be outrageous.  He's great playing off all the animals, harassing football players, and making a nuisance of himself.  Director Tom Shadyac, who had his feature debut here, knows exactly what to do with him.  Everything in the movie is big, loud, in-your-face, and heightened to match.  It feels like a hyperactive kids' movie, and I suspect that this is one of those films that is best loved by little boys of a certain immature mentality.    

As for me, a rapidly aging woman with a historically terrible sense of humor, this retrospective has proved illuminating, though not particularly pleasant.  The irony is that I really like Jim Carrey as an actor, but I have no patience for the majority of his most successful films.  I liked all of his movies that made no money - the artsy, pretentious flicks like "Man in the Moon" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."  However, you can't really talk about his career without the context of "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber," so I'm glad I finally bit the bullet.

---