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Critic's Grade: Fuckin' B
Twenty years since Dumb & Dumber entrenched the Brothers Farrelly as keepers of a peculiarly-'90s frat house/preschool garden of filmic offense, the directors return to their first heroes for the sequel just about nobody demanded. As if there were any doubt, Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) remain resolutely unchanged. Indeed, Lloyd has stayed literally paralyzed, for an elongated goof. To paraphrase one of their iconic contemporaries, that's what we love about Harry and Lloyd—they get older, their comedy stays the same age.
By means of a long mislaid postcard, Harry finds out he has a daughter, and, as happens, he needs a kidney while Lloyd wants to bone her. This is the spark to force them away from Rhode Island and into the outside world. All other plot devices—learning the daughter's adoptive family is led by a reclusive genius (Steve Tom as Dr. Pinchelow) eager to share news of his world-changing discovery; learning he's slowly being murdered by an unfaithful wife (Laurie Holden) and her lover (Rob Riggle)—matter so much less than the potential bathroom humor implied by the name Pinchelow.
These days, with animation departments home to inventive techniques and anarchic sensibilities, "live-action cartoon" might seem a badge of honor, but the term wasn't always complimentary. Once upon a time, deeming a film no more than a live-action cartoon meant hackneyed gag reels—successive diversions of no consequence to narrative and splayed forth with questionable logic or taste—and it's to this tradition the Dumb & Dumber flicks so gloriously aspire. Even disastrous, distractingly bad jokes scarcely register because there's bound to be another one moments away. And, if the characters don't seem to notice, why should we?
There are none of the story arcs or sweetened landings of lessons learned, as in Kingpin and Something About Mary. The set pieces that, for better or worse, define the Farrelly brothers' oeuvre are given no time to develop within the ADD high jinks, with a fusillade of absurdist puns and scatological taunts midst a Lifetime pic about two mildly handicapped friends on an amiable, misguided quest. Within the Harry & Lloyd chronicles alone, the directors' cinematic failings actually heighten subversive qualities otherwise unearned.
It all should feel tragic. Few things age more poorly than the charms of an arrested boyhood, but these stories take pains to resist portraying Harry and Lloyd as sympathetic characters. Their enfant-terrible shtick has been left to ferment so long that we're left with a bitterly wicked brew. Though the pair is rarely conscious of the death and dismemberment left strewn along their wake, when made conscious of all they've wrought, they're quick to respond with unapologetic giggles. This is what children are actually like: eager for anything to dispel the unending monotony and worried only about their own imminent fates.
Moreover, as filmmakers famously steeped in the comedy of ugliness, the brothers take special delight in the increasingly desiccated visage of Carrey, aging into a cross between Ruth Gordon and a gnarled bedpost. When Harry and Lloyd encounter the town strumpet and bemoan the added years and pounds—her smiley-face tramp stamp now broadened and sagged until the grin points down—the effect's hurtful only so long as we ignore that the actress is Kathleen Turner. If the peerless screen goddess can appreciate the joke of fading beauty, who are we to complain?
Throughout, there's a desperate, keening commitment to unearthing the grossness of everyday life—the way our bodies inevitably betray any protestation of dignity. Perhaps such enviable resources shouldn't be given to directors boasting the unreconstructed instincts of 10-year-old boys, but handing them cameras and expecting them not to film their own bungholes just seems, well, stupid.
WWeek 2015