How does one even begin to review a sequel to one of the greatest comedies in American cinema? Anyone born in the mid to late 80s and on grew up on Dumb and Dumber. Quotes from the movie are used as common discourse among fans even to this day. Had a sequel been made a year or two years after the original came out it probably would've tried its best to recreate the magic of the original and failed miserably putting an end to Harry and Lloyd. Instead, a prequel was released and will go down in history as one of the worst movies ever made. But, give it twenty years... and it's a crapshoot whether or not history will be made again.
While Dumb and Dumber To pales in comparison to the original (because let's face it, it's solid comedy gold that will never be touched again), I didn't hate this movie. Let's jump back a second. The original film was such an important movie to me. Growing up I knew I wanted to be like Jim Carrey, but Dumb and Dumber solidified that for me. It was a movie that I liked for the silliness as a child, a movie I liked for the sight gags as a teenager, and I movie I love for its cleverness as an adult. It's one of the rare films of my life that can still make me laugh to this day. Much like Shawshank Redemption, Dumb and Dumber never fails at being on cable. And even though I've seen it more than probably any movie in existence, I'll still turn it on... and crack up. I'll notice new jokes. Remember old favorites. Relish in the delight of a new clever one-liner I never got as a younger man. ("I desperately want to make love to a school boy!") Creating a sequel is as bold a feat as creating three more Star Wars movies. There is a VERY high expectation and a lot of room for failure. I can say confidently that Dumb and Dumber To did not fail.
This time around it's twenty years later and Harry and Lloyd are back on the road again. One of Harry's kidneys are failing and he's in desperate need of a transplant. He learns from an old postcard that his long lost beau, Fraida Felcher birthed a daughter of Harry's. So, Lloyd and Harry hit the old road again in search of his daughter in order to ask her for one of her kidneys. It's good that the Farrelly brothers knew that the best place to keep the two idiots is on the road. If they stick around in one spot too long the joke wears off. Keep giving them rich new places to go and they'll find ways of screwing everything up in hilarious ways. So, putting them back on a road trip was the right step.
But, here's the difference... Harry and Lloyd are NOT the same characters as the original. I was able to tell this immediately from the trailer, which was one of the main reasons I was worried about the movie being good in the first place. What the first film did that was so ingenious was they made their characters-- and this is going to sound very contradictory-- subtly as well as obviously dumb. What I mean by this is that Harry and Lloyd, on the outside, from a bystander's perspective, are normal dudes. Their idiocy is subtle most of the time- like Lloyd misunderstanding an Austrian accent for someone from New Jersey and then following it up with a bad impersonation of someone from Australia. Or when Lloyd tries to convince Harry to go to Aspen and his reaction is "I don't know, Lloyd, the French are assholes", it's said with conviction. Like these guys GENUINELY don't know these facts. They're not over-the-top with their numbskullery, it's done with subtlety. However, when it does get obvious-- like Harry licking the ski lift bar, or Lloyd falling off the jetway (again)-- it's very obvious. But the characters aren't complete morons. They're the type of guys that use phrases like "beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano" but have no idea what it means. Jeff Daniels especially plays Harry with the most conviction. It was a brilliant and unfamiliar line they walked with these characters and it's something we haven't seen since.
This time around there is zero subtlety. Like I said earlier, they're not the same characters. It's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Just different. They don't play the characters as straight men doing dumb things. They play them as dumb men doing dumb things. Jim Carrey has reverted back to his In Living Color days of being a human ball of rubber bouncing off the walls excessively like a little kid with ADHD who just did a line of coke, but most of it actually works in the film. It's actually refreshing watching Carrey back to his old ways here of being able to let loose, considering he hasn't had a good comedic film released since 2000. Jeff Daniels here has almost entirely forgotten what the character of Harry was actually like and pretty much gone full retard. But, somehow, it also works. In fact, Daniels might even be funnier than Carrey this time. They've kinda Benjamin Button-ed themselves-- de-aged and regressed into drooling, selfish, lovable, idiot three year olds. But, somehow, and I can't even begin to explain how, it works. It's like they couldn't figure out how to match the brilliance of the first movie and based a new film entirely around "do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?" It's one of the most iconic scenes of the original, but not exactly the most elegant or profound of scenes.
Most of the gags land. Some don't. The ones that don't will illicit eye rolling, but it's not long before the laughter resumes. After having gone back and surveyed all of the movies I've seen this year, I can confidently say that Dumb and Dumber To is, by far, the funniest movie of 2014. There are moments where I was laughing so hard I didn't hear the next five things said that followed the joke. There were moments where I was physically aware that my cheeks were hurting from laughing. Yes, it's 99% low brow humor, but instead of playing out a bunch of tired old jokes way past their prime, the movie plays out more like the style of The Naked Gun trading in subtlety for parody. Harry and Lloyd are a lot less "His head fell off... yeah, he was pretty old" and more about so-bad-they're-actually-funny word puns ("Come on, Harry, she's the fruit of your loom"). They've become caricatures of their former selves to the ninth degree. And it's not a bad thing.
The characteristics are more inconsistent than they were in the first film. Lloyd was an illiterate and Harry wasn't. Lloyd was always coming up with different schemes and Harry would be the voice of reason. This time it's a free for all of debauchery and both don't seem to have that inner voice telling them that what they're doing is wrong. Half of what they do and say kind of seem like the Harry and Lloyd of old, but the rest of what they do, you might have to forget about the first movie altogether. There's a scene in film that is in the trailer where Harry goes to call his daughter and Lloyd answers the phone next to him and they don't realize they're talking to each other. Not only is it an old re-used gag, but the Harry and Lloyd of '94 would know they were talking to each other. They were dumb. But not that dumb. There's moments like that (see also: the nursing home scene with the old lady) that are very few and far between that remind the viewer that this isn't the original movie. Also, in the original their stupidity was always inadvertently leading people to assume they were geniuses or criminal masterminds and much more cunning than they actually were. This one essentially throws that notion out the window. But, like I've said many times before... it works.
If we hadn't had twenty years to know and love these characters, it probably would've been a throwaway movie. But since it doesn't have to take the time to convince us that these human cartoons are actually real, we're able to forget all logic and just enjoy the dumb ride. The humor won't be for everyone and there will probably be a few disappointed people out there expecting more, but the general consensus that I overheard at least a half a dozen times from filmgoers around my theater was that "it was a lot funnier than I expected." And it definitely was. I didn't hate Anchorman 2, but Dumb and Dumber To succeeds far more after the long wait than Anchorman did. As a sequel, this movie wouldn't even be able to stand in the same room as the original. But, as a separate entity entirely with characters and actors we love... it's pretty damn funny and pretty damn good.
B
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