It’s been twenty years since Harry (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd (Jim Carrey) went on a cross-country trip and their utter dumbness made the movie the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber a hit with audiences. And now they’re all back.
Once again Harry and Lloyd take to the road. This time Harry learns he has a grown daughter Penny (Rachel Melvin) who was given up for adoption and he’s on a mission to find her. Lloyd decides to help his pal out on his search, but he’s got his own reasons for wanting to meet Penny. After one look at her picture Lloyd gets the hots for her, but he won’t tell Harry that.
There’s also stuff with the guys attending big ritzy gatherings and an evil couple wanting to knock the pair off. Hopefully the wait of twenty-years will be worth it for fans and this flick will provide the laughs like the original did.
Don’t count on it or you’ll feel dumber than these guys.
Very quickly, I liked the original Dumb and Dumber. My friends and I went to see it, enjoyed it, laughed at it and that was it. I watched it a few times after that, but I never considered it sitting in the echelon hall of ‘comedy classics’ like so many others do. It did its job, it was a funny, dopey comedy.
The window to a real actual sequel to it closed in my mind after a certain point. I figured after that prequel movie Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd – which I had no interest in and never saw- that was it.
But as is our current climate any older movie that was popular and that people remember the title of has to be dug up and either remade or given a long-delayed sequel. In the case of a sequel everyone fondly remembers the original and gets infected with the excitement of finally getting to see a follow-up to it. It also probably helped that Carrey is in desperate need of a hit, along with the Farrelly’s that got this to happen.
And the movie stinks. I really wasn’t expecting this to be any good, but I was shocked at how unfunny the movie actually is. The comedy is so incredibly forced and desperate I felt more embarrassed for everyone involved than wanting to laugh at anything contained in this flick. As has become all too often when I see a remake or a long-delayed revisit of a movie I was left thinking, ‘they should have just left it alone’.
Let me be clear. I can enjoy a dumb comedy – when it’s funny. Carrey and Daniels characters have somehow upped their dumbness to an all-out unbelievable level they just left me shaking my head. They’ve also become incredibly annoying and obnoxious. These aren’t the two characters I remember from the original. Those guys I liked and were more innocuous in their dumbness. These sequel characters are unpleasant assholes. I really didn’t like them and they weren’t funny.
At one point I was really hoping the hitman was going to knock off these two so the movie would end sooner.
I could cite examples of differences of the humor from the original to this crappy sequel and explain what I’m talking about, but it’s not worth it. This time around all the humor is malicious, disgusting and gross. I didn’t laugh once during the entire thing.
It’s yet another movie where comedy has become revolting, raunchy shock gags. The guys stick their hands in their ass cracks, they yell at a woman to show them her tits, lazy fart jokes, sex jokes and Kathleen Turner shows up so whore jokes can be aimed at someone.
And the ‘homage’ scenes of the original movie they try to do don’t offer anything other than being uninspired retreads and they leave you thinking – it was funny when they did something similar to this scene twenty years ago, gee I wish I was watching that movie.
Actually I will compare two scenes from the original and this junky sequel. The original ends with a busload of bikini models telling the guys they’re looking for some oil boys, the guys reply they might find someone in the next town interested in the job. They walk off into the sunset saying, “Gee, some guys have all the luck”.
This one ends with the guys seeing two hot girls, they run up to them, push them into some bushes, laugh at them and then run away.
Maybe it’s me, but I find one of those jokes funnier than the other.
The Farrelly’s don’t help from behind the camera. A lot of the gags are so blatantly telegraphed that you’re left waiting for the movie to catch up to what you see coming. Carrey and Daniels feel off a bit, they don’t have that chemistry that was so unexpected to see in the original. Other than Penny there’s not one memorable supporting actor in this who does anything of note.
The story is just a lazy retread of the original. Granted you’re not going into this expecting a groundbreaking screenplay, but at least the original felt like the guys were going on a road trip adventure. This one feels like a trudge through an adolescent landscape of poop jokes.
I initially started watching this movie one night and gave up on it ten minutes in not expecting to finish it. Fortuitously, I had to do some cleaning a few days later, needed something in the background to watch and decided to press on with Dumb and Dumber To. And it still didn’t hold my attention. Yes, I was more entertained by dusting than this horrible movie.
One of the worst movies I’ve seen in quite awhile.
Yeah… People like to talk about the quality dropoff of a lot of filmmakers who managed to develop large fan-bases early in their careers…
Sandler went from good(ish) to unwatchable. Shymalan went from excellent(Sixth Sense) Really good,(Unbreakable) fun summer fair(the Sixth Sense) self-indulgent legacy obsession but still eh passable(the village) Awful movie with one or two interesting ideas sticking out of the mess(lady in the Water) Legendarily awful(The happening) how does he keep getting work?! (Avatar) Put him out of his misery(After Earth)
People rarely bring up the decline of the Farelly Brothers though… These guy made 3 classic comedies in a row (Kingpin, Dumb & Dumber and There's Something About Mary) arguably the 3 funniest movies of the 90's and then put out the not bad at all but very average Me, Myself and Irene and Shallow Hal films…. And then… Just went off the high-dive with the Heartbreak Kid which was ridiculously unpleasant to watch and saw them clearly out of ideas with cheap humor, stupid TMZ flavor-of-the-week cameos, and even re-purposing jokes from their old hits and hoping noone would remember.
These guys have progressively gotten worse with each film in the last decade and need to retire. Movie 43 was a lazy, dismal, passionless "effort" that ended its main story with a scene where the actors broke character and cynically complained about how ridiculous the movie was before cutting to the final skit. Looking back on it though, you have to wonder how close the ending of that skit was to how the set really was and how jaded the cast and crew really were. I like to tell myself that that was a real on-set exchange that they didn't cut because the couldn't figure out how to end an already unfunny skit, so they just left it there hoping it would get some meta laughs.
Dumb and Dumber to… The funniest joke is the title…. I saw it in theaters and considered walking out… I knew it would suck but man did the filmmakers so obviously hope that cheap shock-laughs and nostalgia-pandering would carry this movie for 2 hours. It was awful.
Now Peter Farrelly has done a drama with Green Book and is Oscar nominated