Dumb and Dumber To is more sad than funny.
Sure, there are some gross out jokes, a couple “look at these two idiots” moments and myriad attempts to harken back to the hilarity of the first film, but those nostalgia plays make you think of the first movie – which was damn-near perfect – and question why everyone involved with this movie actually thought it was a good idea to bring back the nitwit tandem of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne 20 years later.
Sitting through this painful exercise is a reminder that Jim Carrey – once a fresh, spark plug of a talent that exploded into stardom – has become a caricature of himself. He’s a fifty-something playing Jim Carrey in the late ’90s and it’s not very appealing. The strange thing with Carrey is that he didn’t really have any one performance that was awful during the two decades between being Lloyd – he kind of just jumped the shark gradually. Young comedic actors passed him by and now that he’s trying to reclaim the territory he’s lost, it feels forced… an unfunny.
What’s worse is that Jeff Daniels has moved so far beyong the role of Harry Dunne that seeing him backtrack into the realm of catheter jokes and being a simpleton makes you question his decision-making process. He was solid as part of the ensemble in The Hours and showed how talented he really is in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Thanks to The Newsroom, it’s hard not to see Will McAvoy, ACN news anchor, when you see him, even when he’s a disheveled mess here.
Dumb and Dumber To doesn’t add anything new to the world – it’s a re-work of the original plot (morons get in the way of some scheming) with all the really memorable pieces replaced by forced attempts at being funny that generally miss the mark. It’s a paint-by-numbers attempt to make bank on the backs of characters people already know and love, but all it does is make you question why someone (or several someones) thought it was a good idea to bring this duo back 20 years later.
It wasn’t.
It was a very bad idea.
