Dumb and Dumber To's Badness Could Give You an Ulcer by David
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Dumb and Dumber To‘s Badness Could Give You an Ulcer By David Edelstein Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let‘s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick. Along with the relatively highbrow Stepbrothers, it‘s the ne plus ultra of moron slapstick, the film against which all cretinous child-men assaults on taste must be measured. The spiky, manic, abrasive Jim Carrey was exquisitely offset by the big, schlubby, amiable Jeff Daniels, and if a few of the gags went thunk (who bats 1,000?), there was a lot more art in their construction than the movie‘s slapdash frames suggested. The Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, turned doofusness into a state of grace. And now they‘ve turned it back into a state of gracelessness. Wanna read the most annoying sound in the world? AAAEEEEEAAAEIIIIGGHHHHHEEEAAEHH. It‘s not that they didn‘t try. This isn‘t some cynical piece of garbage like Another 48 Hrs. Carrey and Daniels are in there working hard and almost getting their tricky rhythms back. On paper, the premise sounds more than serviceable. Harry (Daniels), who desperately needs a kidney transplant, discovers a 23-year-old postcard from an old flame telling him she‘s pregnant with his baby. Said flame, Fraida Felcher (Kathleen Turner), tells Harry and Lloyd (Carrey) that she gave the baby up for adoption but has a recent photo; it shows a young woman, Penny (Rachel Melvin), who makes Lloyd‘s eyeballs smoke. Lloyd convinces Harry to hit the road in search of Penny — ostensibly to ask her to donate a kidney, but more because Lloyd sees a babe who might finally displace Dumb and Dumber‘s Mary Swanson. But someone else is after Penny: a killer (Rob Riggle) in league with her adopted mom (Laurie Holden), who‘s slowly poisoning Penny‘s adopted professor father (Steve Tom), who gives Harry and Lloyd a package for her that might be worth billions of dollars ... The script could have used another draft or two. Harry and Lloyd‘s level of dumb and dumbness keeps shifting; sometimes they sound like sophisticates camping it up — unfunnily. The old gags aren‘t repeated, but the Farrellys constantly invoke them, using their first film as an ongoing reference point. ―Blind Billy in 4C‖ is all grown up and still loves birds — with disastrous consequences. We get the second-most-annoying sound in the world. (What‘s annoying is how long it takes to get to the punch line.) Lame malapropisms abound: ―She‘s the fruit of his loom.‖ Lloyd fantasizes fighting off bad guys to save Penny, but it‘s a pale echo of Lauren Holly‘s bare bum and a throbbing heart pulled out of a ninja warrior and daintily dropped into a doggie bag. Harry puts peanut butter on his dick. Penny turns out to have inherited the Dumb gene and wants to work in a leprechaun colony. Okay, that one‘s not bad (especially when Lloyd says you have to go to Ireland, not Africa, for that), but I reckon four out of every five jokes played to silence at the preview screening. If Dumb and Dumber To were a live comedian, he‘d have said, ―Is this an audience or an oil painting?‖ He‘d have left the stage in tears. He‘d have gone to work in a leprechaun colony. The Farrellys have evidently unlearned what little they knew about staging and composition. (Please understand: I revere Dumb and Dumber, There‘s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal, and parts of their other movies, but stylists they‘re never been.) On the far side of the Farrellys‘ agreeable Three Stooges remake, it‘s easy to register the Stooges‘ influence on Dumb and Dumber To, but the timing is off in almost every scene: You either see the joke an instant before it comes, so it‘s no surprise, or an instant after it passes, so you say, ―Oh, that was a joke ... Gee, it stunk.‖ The key to Lloyd and Harry‘s characters is that they‘re incorrigible pranksters, that nothing comes second to hot-footing each other or someone else. But this time we feel more like the hit man played by Mike Starr in Dumb and Dumber. We want to say, ―GUYS!!! ENOUGH!!!‖ The movie‘s badness could give you an ulcer. And yet ... I came away respecting Carrey, whose eyes still glitter under his hideous bowl haircut and Daniels, who avidly jumps back into the pigpen. (Daniels might be known for a higher grade of project, but he has always credited Dumb and Dumber with keeping his movie career alive and obviously relishes the work.) Kathleen Turner is fearlessly brassy; it‘s a shame she‘s shot and lighted so poorly, that the Farrellys didn‘t protect her. I didn‘t watch thinking that Dumb and Dumber To was fated to be a disaster from its conception — only that comedy is famously hard and this particular effort didn‘t pay off. I‘d still get in line for Dumber and Dumbest. The Movies of 1994: The Near-Perfect ‗Dumb and Dumber‘ Moviepix Movies November 13, 2014 by Tom Carson Print All of these years later, nobody has made a movie about Monica Lewinsky‘s affair with Bill Clinton, and I wish someone would hop to it. Sarah Silverman isn‘t getting any younger, people. But you can‘t beat my pick for the right guys to handle the job: Bobby and Peter Farrelly — at least if we could somehow time-zap ‘em back to their prime. Closet innocence fans disguised as merchants of crass, they were so in sync with the Clinton era‘s Krispy Kreme gestalt that the nation‘s first (spiritually) 12-year-old president — if the Secret Service code name for the White House in Bill‘s instant-gratification heyday wasn‘t ―The Cookie Jar,‖ it shoulda been — sometimes seems like a ghost character haunting their ‘90s movies. Heck, so does Monica. Getting the sequel treatment with Dumb and Dumber To this week, Dumb and Dumber came first, followed by Kingpin (which the Farrellys didn‘t write) and then There‘s Something About Mary — their biggest hit, thanks mostly to Cameron Diaz‘s hair-gel misadventures with Ben Stiller‘s homemade Krispy Kreme icing. The Movies of 1994 Grantland takes on a golden year in cinema. Released the same year that a certain stain on someone‘s blue dress was getting the House GOP in an uproar, it must have been the first time someone‘s jism was employed as a sight gag in a mainstream comedy, forever cementing — well, so to speak — the Farrellys‘ rude-boy rep. But the movie‘s use of rock‘s ultimate Mr. Innocent, Jonathan Richman, as its singing narrator amounted to an admirably sneaky way of foregrounding old-fashioned schmaltz while making someone else responsible for voicing it. That way, it didn‘t intrude on the jokes. As if demonstrating how fragile a gestalt can be, things started to go south with 2000‘s Me, Myself & Irene, a movie that nobody on either side of the camera seemed to have much heart for. (D&D star Jim Carrey probably didn‘t think he‘d end up needing to go back to the Farrellys for a cred transfusion any more than they thought they‘d need to go back to him for box office insurance, and neither camp got what it wanted.) Though the brothers recouped to some extent with Shallow Hal, an apologia for their own perceived callousness that might‘ve turned painfully saccharine if not for Jack Black‘s mad-eyed zest in the title role, the old mojo has never returned in their later movies. Maybe they‘re waiting for Hillary. In the meantime, I wish Dumb and Dumber To all the best, really I do. If nothing else, I‘ll bet sight unseen that it‘s less rotten than 2003‘s Dumb and Dumberer, which nobody from the original was involved in. But the odds are that the 2014 reprise wouldn‘t exist if the brothers, not to mention Carrey, couldn‘t really use a hit 20 mostly not-so-great years down the road. And I hope they don‘t mess up my memories of a movie that I think is close to perfect. This side of, oh, Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot,1 ―perfect‖ is a word that doesn‘t get applied to post- 1930s screen comedies, even beloved ones, too often. Let alone one that has Carrey‘s Lloyd Christmas fantasizing about charming the daylights out of a roomful of rich sophisticates, his inamorata included, by lighting his own farts. But there isn‘t a scene, including that one, or a performance that doesn‘t deliver exactly what the Farrellys want it to. You aren‘t sitting through weak ideas or misfired digressions to get to the good parts, the way we‘re all used to. Considering that (a) the Farrellys had never directed before, and (b) Dumb and Dumber‘s tone is a lot trickier to sustain than it looks, the absence of vacillation and visibly panicky second thoughts about the whole premise is impressive. Yet what may be more remarkable is how the movie stays patently good-hearted without ever resorting to sentiment. The goal is to get audiences feeling huge tenderness for people we‘re primed to think are ridiculous, and we do. But that doesn‘t mean they‘ve grown any less ridiculous, because — well, at least back then — the brothers weren‘t big on redeeming anyone.