CARREY OUT
ME, MYSELF & IRENE
Directed by the Farrelly Brothers
Written by the Farrelly Brothers and Mike Cerrone
With Jim Carrey, Renee Zellweger
UA South, De Vargas R 116 min.
When your comic inventiveness runs to a guy crapping on his neighbor's lawn or commandeering a suck at the breast of a nursing mother, you'd better have a helluva comic actor to bail you out. This must have been the game plan of the Farrelly Brothers, looking to ride the wave of their gross-out blockbuster There's Something About Mary. They hired Jim Carrey, filmdom's highest-priced comedian, and gave him a script that could have been written during recess at junior high. The guy does his best, but it's like bailing with a sieve.
Carrey leaps, he crawls, he slithers, he rubber-faces, he crashes through windows and tumbles down embankments, he even drops his pants for that revenge squat (not the only time he'll lower his trousers in a search for laughs), but it's no use; Carrey is funny, but he's not that funny.
He plays Charlie, a mild-mannered Rhode Island highway patrolman. His troubles start when he's humiliated on his wedding day by the African-American Mensa-president dwarf who chauffeurs the limo. When in the fullness of time his wife produces black triplets, Charlie willingly suspends disbelief. He raises them on Richard Pryor videos, and grown up, they become huge louts (Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, and Jerod Mixon) who use "motherfucker" as everything from article to adverb, but are actually smart. When Charlie's wife runs off with the dwarf, he sublimates his feelings. And develops Advanced Delusionary Schizophrenia with Involuntary Narcissistic Rage. In other words, a split personality. His alter ego is Hank, a mean, crude bastard with a Dirty Harry swagger who dishes out revenge. Charlie has medicine to keep him bottled up, but when he forgets it, his evil genius bursts loose.
There's a plot. Irene P. Waters (get it?), played as wallpaper by a resigned Renee Zellweger, is a greenskeeper who may know something about a nefarious scheme that involves a rich guy and a golf course and most of the New York State Police. It's important enough to have almost everyone in the movie except Carrey trying to kill her, but not important enough to tell us what it is. Charlie's supposed to escort Irene back to New York and turn her over to the authorities, but when the attempts on her life start, he and Hank spring to the rescue, and both fall in love with her.
By the end of this mess I was trying to find places to laugh out of sympathy for Carrey, who really tries. He does some nice two-characters-fighting-for-control-of-the-same-body schtick, but Steve Martin did it better in All of Me. He works hard for his $20 million, but that sieve just won't hold water.
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