ME, MYSELF & IRENE **1/2 (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers (bill@filmfreakcentral.net)
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starring Jim Carrey, Renee Zellweger, Chris Cooper, Michael Bowman screenplay by Peter Farrelly & Mike Cerrone & Bobby Farrelly directed by The Farrelly Brothers
Memo to the Farrelly Brothers (There's Something About Mary, Kingpin): comedies don't need plot, they need jokes. While watching Me, Myself & Irene, I thought back to a bit from that show of shows, "The Simpsons", in which papa Homer wails "Be funny!" as he attacks the television during an especially lame program. The film's dense (in every sense of the word) screenplay, an unseemly love letter to Rhode Island (the Farrellys' birthplace), is beneath Jim Carrey, who is given precisely two notes to play that he has dwelled upon enough already.
Charlie (Carrey), a Rhode Island state trooper, has let people walk all over him for years; his bottled hostility has finally come uncorked and manifested itself in the form of a second personality by the name of Hank, a swaggering, Clint Eastwood-type with zero powers of repression. The police force puts him on medication, then asks him to escort a cutie pie criminal (Renee Zellweger, still wincing) from Rhode Island to Messena, where her arrest warrant awaits.
We expect that their trip to Messena will comprise the bulk of the story, and that along the way Charlie will lose or forget to take his pills and hulk out. Despite the odds, he and Irene will fall in love. But Me, Myself & Irene needlessly goes and gets itself a villain--worse, one with an entirely incomprehensible motive. Chris Cooper, an actor not famed for his comic gifts, is embarrassingly earnest as the heavy.
Even prior to Cooper's entrance, the theatre begins to smell like flop sweat. Carrey's patented fearlessness provokes a couple of belly laughs early on, but his performance, a sort of Jekyll & Hyde revue of his Truman Show and Cable Guy personas, grows old fast. Contributing to this over-familiarity is a climax that effectively duplicates Liar, Liar's hilarious bathroom brawl between Carrey and himself. (And yet the Farrellys snipped a moment in which Carrey had sex with a watermelon because it too closely resembled American Pie's pastry rape.)
Everything about Me, Myself & Irene lacks edge, including the gross-out gags (the second best of which the filmmakers have the nerve to apologize for in a quick, closing credits take) and shockingly unfunny narration (whose tediousness is highlighted by the brothers' tendency to allow for hypothetically lengthy giggles with slow-paced editing).
Stay through to the bitter end for a mildly amusing post-script.
-June, 2000
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