If you’ve been a follower of this blog, you will probably notice that two months passed between my review of Bruce Almighty and that of Dumb and Dumber. The reason for this was that we watched Dumb and Dumber To around the same time that I was preparing to finish off my Dumb and Dumber review.
I have a confession to make: this movie broke me.
We legitimately felt down in the aftermath of watching Dumber and Dumber To. Not that we had had high hopes for a sequel made twenty years after the original, but then again, the first film was quite good and the same people were working on it. We at least hoped to see that they as creators had grown in that time and that we would see this growth reflected in Dumb and Dumber To.
As it turns out, there is a profound qualitative difference between the two movies. If I had to distill the entirety of this dreadful, slimy bile of a film down into a single word, that word would be “hateful”. I honestly can’t think of a single word more fitting for this movie than “hateful”.
I won’t be writing a long review for this one if I can help it. It’s not worth reliving the film for the sake of breaking down what exactly made it so bad. But I’ll do my best to write something, so that at least my suffering won’t have been in vain.
The general story of Dumb and Dumber To revolves around a quest to find a woman whom Harry believes to be his daughter, in order to obtain a kidney. Yes, another hero’s quest. One of the big differences between this film and the last one, however, is that there is never any veneer of the clever people around the duo believing them to be intelligent.
In my review of Dumb and Dumber, I mention that one of my main joys with the film was the misunderstandings caused by an evil syndicate believing Harry and Lloyd to be super-intelligent rivals to their operations, and continuously being “thwarted” through the pair’s unwitting actions. This is decidedly absent in Dumb and Dumber To, and the film instead relies on other avenues for humour. It is just a shame that the avenue the filmmakers chose to go down was one where they doubled down on the casual bigotry from the last movie. This concept of “bigotry as jokes” could have been seen as a product of its time back in the 90s, but twenty years later it comes across as bizarre and out of place. It might have still worked if it were seen as self-aware, but that never comes across at all.
A major plot point of the film is Lloyd deciding he wants to pursue and have sex with Harry’s twenty-something daughter. There are at least thirty years of difference between their ages and it would be natural to assume this creepiness would at least be played as a joke. But I got no indication from the direction of the film that this was meant to be acknowledged as questionable behaviour at any point.
I made a checklist of the kind of mean-spirited jokes that were made throughout the film, and I counted at least one significant instance apiece of bestiality, racism, sexism, fat jokes, ageism, pederasty and ableism. Surprisingly I did not record an instance of homophobia or transphobia, but then the movie was so saturated with misogyny in particular that it is very likely that I missed a few. Note also that I didn’t set out watching the film to make this checklist; it was about one quarter of the way through the film that enough jarring instances had happened in such quick succession that I was distracted enough from the film’s story to make such a list.
Jokes at the main characters’ expense pale in comparison to the inexplicable cruelty and cynicism flung at every possible marginalised demographic. You want an example? I’ll give you an example. One of the jokes in the film is that Harry’s alleged daughter is so stupid that she gets molested a lot online. There, I’ve said it. Now you know why I don’t want to do any deeper exploration into the humour.
The filmmakers seem to think that what made the first movie so great was not so much the great writing but the two main characters, and so long as they were in the movie doing the same thing it would be okay. They know the first film was successful and funny, and they attempt to capitalise on that by lavishly revisiting many of the old jokes for the nostalgia crowd. There is a fantasy dream sequence in the movie. There is another McGuffin briefcase. The dog car makes a cameo. The breath spray gag (Lloyd sprays away from his mouth, not towards) is brought back. There is a scene where the two are in a car with a “bad guy” sat between them. The duo even introduces the “second-most annoying sound in the world”. I think might have enjoyed these throwbacks much more if the rest of the film actually added something to the franchise and showed me why a sequel was a good idea. It did not deliver, and rather made me question why I even needed to be born.
Don’t get me wrong: there were some good original jokes. There were several laugh out loud moments and some fun wordplay. But talking about them kind of feels like an attempt to redeem the film. And that feels about as productive as implying the fire wasn’t as bad as it could have been because the bathtub was full of water when the house burnt down.
The closing credits of the film juxtapose scenes from both movies, almost as if trying to convince us that the quality of the two are comparable in any way. In practice, though, it just left me feeling the emptiness of what I’d just seen; the hole that Dumb and Dumber could have filled, instead of ONE HOUR AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of uncomfortable, cynical sludge.
I run a regular Meetup group in Melbourne where we watch terrible movies for fun. I absolutely, unequivocally regret watching this movie. I will never screen it for an audience, because I respect my audience too much to leave them as depressed as I was when the film was over. My movie nights, after all, are ultimately meant to be about fun.
Up until now the lowest-reviewed film has been Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Dumb and Dumber To is now in the lead by a long stretch. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was annoying, but was it as hateful? My friend and I are starting to fear we may need to re-rewatch it after our main quest is over just to decide once and for all whether early Jim has indeed been overtaken in awfulness by 2014 Jim. I really, truly hope this won’t be necessary.
My rating: 0 daughters out of 1
The Jim Carreython 