I love Farrelly Brothers movies. Well, most of them. Well, every
one but this one, in fact. Though, it must be said, that I did laugh
a few times. Quite a few times. But it was the sort of laughter that
you are ashamed for engaging in.
The plot is the problem, mainly. I mean, there is none. No, not even
a little bit. It pretends to have a plot, but it doesn't, so it has
to keep putting in this narrator to explain things to us. The narrator
sounds like he might be more at home doing the voiceover on a "Dukes
of Hazzard" episode or something. What the hell is he doing in
a Jim Carrey movie, anyway? Sure, the device of having a guy sing
a song and strum a guitar while discussing the plot of "There's
Something About Mary" worked. But that was more inspired, more
fun, more hilarious than the narrator in this one. The reason that
movie had two guys serving as its Greek Chorus was because it was
a clever, surreal little aside. It was the icing atop a bizarre, wonderful,
gut-busting cake. The reason this movie has a narrator is because
you would have no chance of keeping up with the plot if it didn't.
Though the plot still doesn't make any sense. And worse still, the
narrator is intrusive. His presence ruins more than one joke that
would have been really funny otherwise.
But the movie has more problems than just the narrator. You know the
premise of this movie:
Jim Carrey has two personalities, both are in love with Renee Zellweger.
That alone would have made a funny movie. But the Farrellys don't
seem to trust their instincts here. Before the plot kicks in, this
is a hilarious film. The first ten minutes alone are worth the price
of rental, and his children are a real comic find. There is a bit
with a cow that also elicited big laughs from me. But aside from that,
well, it seems that the Farrellys don't trust their own filmmaking
instincts. They don't let the relationship between Charlie (Jim Carrey,
funnier here that in "The Grinch", though I doubt I even
needed to mention that) and his alter ego Hank and Irene (the largely
wasted Renee Zellweger) develop on its own terms. They don't give
it space to breathe. Instead they would rather shoehorn in some jokes
about chickens and dildos and other labored enterprises that just
leave one with a bewildered look on their face. Yes, they still have
a gift for developing a joke and building on it (the cow scene) but
they also seem out of control of many of the things that helped their
other movies work. There is none of the underlying sweetness of "Mary"
or "Kingpin" or "Dumb and Dumber" (which, as Roger
Ebert once said, is sorta like the "Citizen
Kane" of dumb guys on the road movies). There is none of
the love that they exhibited for the characters in their other films.
There is none of the outrageousness. Sure, seeing a chicken sticking
out of a man's ass is shocking but it isn't as funny as it should
be. The whole movie tries to hard to be shocking, not enough to be
funny.
Yes, it has some big laughs in it. Don't get me wrong. It just doesn't
have as many of them. I can watch "There's Something About Mary"
again and again and again and still laugh myself silly at it. But
damned if there isn't MORE to that movie. Damned if there isn't a
hell of a lot of cleverness in there. That was why it worked. This
one is lacking both the cleverness and the punch of the earlier films.
We've seen a lot of this before. A man beating the crap out of himself
is still funny, but not as funny as it was in "Fight
Club" or even in Carrey's own "Liar, Liar".
Still, Carrey does this stuff very well, Renee is very sweet and it
does have a nunchuck-wielding midget in it, so it's not a total loss.
