Carrey is a talent but no real discipline here

My dad is probably laughing at me from heaven tonight. For all the times I begged him to take me to, and all the times we fought over, Jim Carrey movies I think tonight I finally understood the other side’s point about his obnoxiousness. A bad feeling set in early. It’s not that he’s totally unfunny in “Ace Ventura”, it’s that he seems to fear the very aspect of not being funny.

He’s a smorgasbord of different talents- from rubber-faced mugging, to impressions, to spastic movement, to vocal inflections and pitch, to talking out of his ass. It feels like i’m missing some stuff but that’s because it’s hard to think of a comedic actor who’s chewed scenery as thoroughly as Carrey does. A mental hospital scene is still his crowning achievement here- going full force bizarre, and at one point, doing a full slo-mo replay of a football play. Other times, he seems to be trying to strangle comedic life out of a hollow tree.

The plot is clever, even if it doesn’t serve much purpose than to have a tie-in with the NFL and get some big names like Dan Marino and Don Shula in there. Courtney Cox is Ace’s partner, though Carrey’s mania is so great that you hardly even notice if she’s there or not, and Sean Young gets some really lame, dreadful lines as the Lieutenant who has an antagonistic relationship with him.
I know you’re not supposed to care about this but even the script itself eventually becomes about forcing a punchline. We never know how he escapes a shark, for example, the scene is more about getting to the bathroom joke after it.

There’s funny stuff to the Ray Finkle scenes. It made me laugh when his mother says that she hopes Marino gets gonorrhea and dies, and of course it’s trying to spoof “The Crying Game”. “In Living Color” probably spoofed it better on the show than anything this “everything and the kitchen” sink movie does. It has no real discipline or rules other than Carrey is just gonna go full Robin Williams’ on crack.


So my dad wins this round, and as critics eventually succumbed to Carrey’s charm and physical prowess, I too, will say that I was probably wrong in overrating him based off this movie. “In Living Color” was one of the greatest shows I had growing up and Carrey was more than just the token white guy on it. There was talent there, I just couldn’t wait for the world to see it.