By Anand Holla
The Farrelly brothers sure know a thing or to, ummm two, about setting up a premise. To limber up the audience’s humour threshold, the writer-director duo taps into the comedy truth that exaggeration is king.
So right off the bat, lovable goofballs Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) convince you that no dumb is too dumb for their dumbness.
The fact that Lloyd has spent 20 years in a catatonic state at a mental institution to pull off a gag on his dim pal Harry, who would even visit him regularly, straightaway establishes the absurdity that the two exemplify and the audience must brace itself for.
Two decades after unexpectedly storming the box-office and just as unexpectedly slow-blooming into a comedy classic over time, Dumb and Dumber now serves as the vehicle for two of cinema’s most endearing knuckleheads’ entertaining comeback. That is, if harmless, brainless humour sits well with your idea of entertainment.
Twenty years post their cross-country misadventure to Aspen, Colorado, Lloyd and Harry are back on another road trip – featuring an assortment of vehicles like a hearse van, a stolen bicycle, and a Zamboni ice resurfacer – to look for Harry’s newly discovered daughter Penny (a hopeless airhead nicely played by Rachel Melvin), who is adopted by a renowned and affluent scientist Dr Pinchelow.
Why? Because Harry now needs a new kidney. In 22-year-old Penny, Harry sees an ideal donor, and in Penny, Lloyd sees a heart-stopping young lady whose photo is enough to send him daydreaming whilst feeling up a trailer truck at a gas station. Then, of course, there’s a sinister plot underway to bump off both Penny and Dr Pinchelow, and our two clueless heroes must unwittingly become part of it.
Directors Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly clearly decided to swipe as much as they could from the accrued goodwill of the original Dumb and Dumber (1994). The movie, therefore, sticks to that safe blueprint, and sometimes more closely than to the audience’s liking.
Be it the story that’s spun around the same tropes of a slapstick-happy road trip mashed with a murder-for-money conspiracy, or the several rehashed funny sequences, the intention evidently was to not make too many waves, but bask in the ripe nostalgia of the original.
So Lloyd still sprays his mouth freshener inside-out and the two appropriately deal with a character whose role and purpose is similar to the bad guy Joe Mantalino in the original – the guy who collapses after chomping on a mouthful of red hot chilli peppers.
We are not complaining, except when the duo chance upon Mutt Cutts – their signature dog groomer van –which sticks out like a forced visual hook that disappears within a minute.
What clicked for the Lloyd and Harry of 1994 was how their genuine sweetness shone through as likeably as their screwball antics. That connection is hard to find in the new edition. So don’t expect quotable lines like “We got no food, we got no jobs ... our pets’ heads are falling off!” or “I like it a lot.”
That said; their capers still draw out a continuous burst of laughs. Time hasn’t been unkind to Carrey and Daniels’ spot-on comic timing or buddy chemistry.
Sample a dialogue: On seeing two women walking towards them, Harry says, “Whoa, Lloyd. Check out the hotties at 12 o’clock.” Lloyd responds, “That’s three hours away. Why can’t I check ’em out now?”
While the gags aren’t all fresh – lighting up firecrackers around an unsuspecting sleeping victim was done in Jackass: The Movie, many moons ago – they are unrelenting. The jokes are silly, stupid even, but they never make any bones about being anything beyond that.
Potty humour, inappropriate one-liners; everything goes. From drinking embalming fluid to using stinky fingers to score free beer, no low is too low for these boneheads.
Carrey, as always, is the movie equivalent of unputdownable – you can’t take your eyes off his comic genius – and Daniels delivers top goods, too.
As for those trashing this brand of comedy or faulting the two for having grown too old for this buffoonery, it’s a case of missing the forest for the trees.
That’s because all that matters for Lloyd and Harry is to have fun. Going by the roaring box-office collections so far, that’s what seems to matter for the majority of moviegoers, too.
The Doha premiere of the film was held at Novo Cinemas, The Pearl-Qatar