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If there was ever a film that did not need a sequel and should have remained firmly entrenched alone in ‘cult classic’ status, it’s 1994 hit Dumb and Dumber.
Alas, Hollywood has the itchiest fingers of them all. And so, 20 years later, we get a sequel which aims its sights at both satisfying older fans who have always wanted a little more, and winning over the younger generation with crude, slapstick silliness.
It fails drastically on both counts.
20 years is a long time in cinema, and the industry has moved on. Pure farce just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore in an age of satire and cynicism; Dumb and Dumber To simply isn’t clever enough to be amusing.
Wheeling out Carrey, who hasn’t released anything remotely decent since Bruce Almighty 11 years ago, is like seeing a rock band you used to love come back for a reunion gig, only to realise half way through that they are well past their prime and the promise that it’s ‘for the fans’ is a desperate facade for their true intentions: ‘for the cash’.
In the mid-1990s, he was the biggest star of them all, but his one-dimensional act has worn so thin that I can’t stick it anymore. If I want to be entertained by a malleable face doing ridiculous things, I’ll hunt down a Mr Bean box-set and be infinitely more satisfied.
The plot is as silly as you’d imagine, with Lloyd (Carrey) and Harry (Daniels) now both in their fifties with no sign of any intellectual progress after their antics in the first film.
In fact, Lloyd is cooped up in a mental asylum and receives regular visits from Harry to change his nappies. During one of the visits, Harry realises that Lloyd is just pranking him and committed himself as a joke. Move over Monty Python ...
They resume living together and Harry reveals that one of his kidneys is failing and he needs a donor. He can’t get one from his nearby parents as he was adopted, and thus are not a match. Therefore, the only option is for the duo to trek across the country to track down Harry’s long-lost daughter who he fathered over 20 years before.
Oh, and the daughter’s name? Fanny Felcher. How wonderfully witty.
The mishaps, puerility and (sigh) frequent flatulence that follow simply emphasise that not only have the actors got old, but so has the humour. Don’t people stop laughing at wind jokes when they leave primary school? Peppering a film rated 15+ with them probably isn’t a sure fire way to get your audience invested in the film.
The story is pretty much exactly the same as the first film, which worked due to the context of its release and society’s tastes at the time. Clever directors and actors came together to make a movie about dumb people, and it paid off with some inspired stupidity. We cringed at the crudeness of it all, but it was fresh and innovative. Trying to mimic that magic, at least 15 years too late, falls flatter than Carrey’s fringe.
The pure brilliance of The Inbetweeners and Borat proves that this type of humour does work for a modern, 21st Century audience, but only if it’s used for the purpose of satirising the world we live in and thematically elevating the film beyond human bodily waste. Crudeness just for the sake of crudeness just doesn’t satisfy now.
It’s clear that the directors have tried to sell the film on nostalgia alone, and it’s embarrassing to see them strain to ‘one-up’ what we saw in the first film. Some of the set pieces are exactly the same and the jokes are only slightly different or rehashed. It suffers from The Hangover II syndrome and further proves that you can’t bottle lightning or replicate brilliance. The film would have been much better off, and probably watchable too, if a new twist was put on the characters or they at least did something different.
There’s something admirable in Carrey and Daniels’ insistence on throwing everything into their role and obviously enjoying what they’re doing, but there comes a point where even the silliest kids grow up eventually. And, it’s usually before they hit 50 and have kids themselves.
If the number of belly laughs in the cinema screening is a measure of how good a comedy is, then my experience of spending two hours of hearing people outside shuffling into other screens, ordering snacks and having a natter in the lobby is anything to go by, then Dumb and Dumber To hovers somewhere around zero. Maybe Dull and Duller would have been a better title.
Admittedly, it raised one or two smiles, but most of them were due to the depressing realisation that buried alongside this film were a few more pieces of my rapidly-evaporating childhood that the movie had systematically destroyed.
Please avoid, both for your sake and for your children’s, lest they have to suffer through Dumb and Dumber For in 2034.
