Dumb and Dumber To | Film Review

As Jim Carrey himself has proven over the years, not all comedy needs to be smart. Nor does it need to be polite. Crude, rude, and below the belt are perfectly fine and have made moviegoers laugh for decades. It does not have to be clever. It does not need to be astute. All a comedy has to do is be funny.

Dumb and Dumber is a perfect example of a dumb comedy. Lloyd (Jim Carrey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels) are bumbling idiots on a selfish quest to get Lloyd some action. Along the way, hijinks and drinkable bodily fluids ensue, and the movie is often pretty hilarious. Now, 20 years later, Carrey and Daniels reprise their roles for one more nostalgic go-round in Dumb and Dumber To.

After Harry finds out that Lloyd has been faking a catatonic state for 20 years, he tells Lloyd his sad secret: He needs a kidney transplant. Through a typically ridiculous series of events, the pair set off on a quest to find Harry’s illegitimate daughter, Penny (the product of an old tryst with the great Kathleen Turner), in an effort to coerce her to pony up a kidney. Of course they end up pursued by neer-do-wells along the way (including Rob Riggle, who is apparently required for every comedy these days), but really the movie is all about the idiotic things these morons do en route to Penny. A road movie for morons.

20 years is a LONG time between films and unfortunately it shows from the first frame. While Jeff Daniels looks extremely comfortable returning to his comedy roots, Jim Carrey really seems like a guy who is forcing it. The talented comedian no longer looks like the insanely rubber-face genius comedian who surprises us at every turn, instead he paints the picture of a washed-up actor trying way too hard to recapture that old glory.

Carrey isn’t ‘bad’ per se, he just comes across as your goofy uncle making asinine faces to brighten your mopey day rather than the gifted comedian he still is. Daniels, on the other hand, steps up his game and seems to relish the opportunity to once again play against type for laughs. It’s a complete contrast from the first film when Carrey was unstoppable and Daniels felt oddly placed.

Directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly return, and once again we are treated to gross-out humor mixed with idiocy. Like their other films for the past decade, they seem to have lost touch with updating their comedy to modern times. These are the same kinds of jokes (hell some of them are the EXACT same jokes) they told 10 or 20 years ago, and they sure haven’t aged well.

Does Dumb and Dumber To offer up some laugh-out-loud moments? Absolutely. There are a couple of hilarious bits that only Carrey and Daniels could pull off and instantly cause you to drop an approving head-nod to your buddies in the theater. It’s just sad that we have to go through long stretches of boredom and forced humor to get there. As a whole movie? It just feels about a decade too late. This isn’t dumb humor, this is just dumb.

Aaron Peterson
The Hollywood Outsider