Me,
Myself & Irene
(2000)
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 Hour and 56 Minutes
Reviewer: Dale
Grade: C+I love Farrelly Brothers movies. Well, most of them. Well, every one but this one, in fact. Though, it must be said, that I did laugh a few times. Quite a few times. But it was the sort of laughter that you are ashamed for engaging in.
The plot is the problem, mainly. I mean, there is none. No, not even a little bit. It pretends to have a plot, but it doesn't, so it has to keep putting in this narrator to explain things to us. The narrator sounds like he might be more at home doing the voiceover on a "Dukes of Hazzard" episode or something. What the hell is he doing in a Jim Carrey movie, anyway? Sure, the device of having a guy sing a song and strum a guitar while discussing the plot of "There's Something About Mary" worked. But that was more inspired, more fun, more hilarious than the narrator in this one. The reason that movie had two guys serving as its Greek Chorus was because it was a clever, surreal little aside. It was the icing atop a bizarre, wonderful, gut-busting cake. The reason this movie has a narrator is because you would have no chance of keeping up with the plot if it didn't. Though the plot still doesn't make any sense. And worse still, the narrator is intrusive. His presence ruins more than one joke that would have been really funny otherwise.
But the movie has more problems that just the narrator. You know the premise of this movie:
Jim Carrey has two personalities, both are in love with Renee Zellweger. That alone would have made a funny movie. But the Farrellys don't seem to trust their instincts here. Before the plot kicks in, this is a hilarious film. The first ten minutes alone are worth the price of rental, and his children are a real comic find. There is a bit with a cow that also elicited big laughs from me. But aside from that, well, it seems that the Farrellys don't trust their own filmmaking instincts. They don't let the relationship between Charlie (Jim Carrey, funnier here that in "The Grinch", though I doubt I even needed to mention that) and his alter ego Hank and Irene (the largely wasted Renee Zellweger) develop on its own terms. They don't give it space to breathe. Instead they would rather shoehorn in some jokes about chickens and dildos and other labored enterprises that just leave one with a bewildered look on their face. Yes, they still have a gift for developing a joke and building on it (the cow scene) but they also seem out of control of many of the things that helped their other movies work. There is none of the underlying sweetness of "Mary" or "Kingpin" or "Dumb and Dumber" (which, as Roger Ebert once said, is sorta like the "Citizen Kane" of dumb guys on the road movies). There is none of the love that they exhibited for the characters in their other films. There is none of the outrageousness. Sure, seeing a chicken sticking out of a man's ass is shocking but it isn't as funny as it should be. The whole movie tries to hard to be shocking, not enough to be funny.
Yes, it has some big laughs in it. Don't get me wrong. It just doesn't have as many of them. I can watch "There's Something About Mary" again and again and again and still laugh myself silly at it. But damned if there isn't MORE to that movie. Damned if there isn't a hell of a lot of cleverness in there. That was why it worked. This one is lacking both the cleverness and the punch of the earlier films. We've seen a lot of this before. A man beating the crap out of himself is still funny, but not as funny as it was in "Fight Club" or even in Carrey's own "Liar, Liar".
Still, Carrey does this stuff very well, Rene is very sweet and it does have a nunchuck-wielding midget in it, so it's not a total loss.
Reviewer: Jones
Grade: B
After failing to receive any sort of validation from the Academy for his past two pictures ("The Truman Show" and "Man On The Moon") Jim Carrey returns to the laugh vehicle film that we all came to know and love him for. In doing so he teams with the Farrelly Brothers, who brought us "There's Something About Mary" a couple years back. The result is a film that is big on laughs, but with a plot that can only be described as paper thin.
Charlie (Jim Carrey) is an eighteen year member of the Rhode Island State Police. In his youth he had a failed marriage, due to his wife having an affair. His wife ran off with the man she was having the affair with, and left the children that were the product of the affair to live with Charlie. Ever since this time Charlie has been avoiding confrontation in whatever shape or form it may be.
This manifests itself in the early stages of the movie. When he asks a man to move his car after it has been parked in a one hour parking space for three days, the man simply throws his keys at Charlie telling him to park it out back. Charlie obeys, and this continues until there comes the straw that broke the camel's back. It comes in the form of a woman at a grocery store asking Charlie if she go in front of him, because she is in a hurry. Charlie, only wanting to purchase a newspaper, complies and the woman summons her children who are pushing a cart that is overflowing with groceries. This is the last straw for Charlie, who goes through a metamorphosis that leaves us with his alter ego, Hank.
Hank is all about confrontation and creates many of the finer moments in the movie. He fixes Charlie's wrongs. He does so in a number of ways that include finding a new parking place for that car, that was so politely parked out back a short time before.
It is at this point in the movie that we meet Irene (Renee Zellweger). She is in some sort of trouble with the law and Charlie has to transport her to New York for interrogation. It turns out that this is just a ruse, and that she is in far greater peril than was originally imagined.
People want her dead and with nowhere else to turn, she looks to Charlie/Hank for help.
Along the way we get introduced to crooked cops, a tagalong who goes by the name of Whitey, amongst many others. Charlie's pseudo-kids make a number of appearances and add lots of laughs to the film, but this, as anyone would suspect, is Jim Carrey's movie.
He gives a madcap performance as the schizo dynamic duo that is Charlie and Hank. The scene where he changes into Hank for the first time is a delight to behold. His face tells the whole story. Whenever he becomes Hank, throughout the rest of the movie, you know who he is, even without the Farrelly Brothers use of closeups to slap you across the face with the fact that he has changed. There is a time later in the film when Charlie and Hank are arguing with one another while trying to avoid bullets and track down Irene. It is during this sequence that Carrey truly shines. His gift for physical humor is on display, as it has never been before.
He literally has to pick HIMself up and get thrown into a car, to imitate Hank picking up Charlie and throwing him into the car. These are just a couple of the moments that show why Jim Carrey is one of our most gifted comedic actors working today, and that he should be recognized as such. Thanks to the Golden Globes for doing so.
Aside from Carrey, this movie is fairly weak. Renee Zellweger is given very little to work with in the role of Irene. She isn't even given a chance to shine in this role, unlike her delightfully sweet and charming work in "Jerry Maguire". The other actors basically collect their paychecks and do little else with the exception of the three guys who play Charlie's kids.
The plot plays itself out merely to allow for the laughs that Jim Carrey will provide. It's not nearly as beautifully conceived a film as "There's Something About Mary," which it will undoubtedly be compared to as time goes by. At the end of the movie, the film steers itself completely away from what little plot there was and just tells us what happened to all the bad guys through some sort of "Dukes of Hazzard" type narration.
All in all, this is a Jim Carrey vehicle at heart and nothing much more. It has it's brilliant moments that will remind you of the side-splitting laughter that was inherent in "There's Something About Mary," but aside from these moments the film is just sort of there. It will most assuredly make you laugh, but not with the charm and steadiness of the aforementioned film.
I would still recommend it, however.... Simply for the laughs.
Besides how can a guy not recommend a movie that features a nunchuk wielding midget?