The Farce Is With Lloyd & Harry

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2014)

As the Farrelly Brothers' freshman foray into lowest common denominator comedy, "Dumb and Dumber" lives up to its dim-witted title. The humor is strictly of the adolescent, simple-minded, scatological variety, with pratfalls galore. Nevertheless, you'll your sphincter will dilate because you'll laugh so hard at this farcical inanity that you'll have a bowel movement. Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels topline as the eponymous morons on a road-trip from Rhode Island to Colorado to deliver an abandoned attaché case crammed with loot that cute heroine Lauren Holly left deliberately behind at the airport on her way to Aspen. When goofy limo driver Carrey does a good deed by latching onto the luggage that the girl of his dreams tried to hand off inconspicuously at the airport terminal, hi-jinks ensue with our harebrained heroes struggling to get the luggage back to her. What our clueless cretins don't comprehend is that she deliberately abandoned the luggage stuffed with $100-thousand dollars to ransom her abducted husband. Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey of the "Ace Ventura" movies) drives a limbo at the outset out and doesn't know the difference between a babe from Austria, much less Australia, and surmises that she is from New Jersey. This woebegone wiseacre is pals with a dog groomer who has converted his ride into the biggest sight gag in the movie. Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels of "Gettysburg") shares the same dream with Lloyd about embarking as entrepreneurs in the business of worm farming. "I've got worms," Lloyd gleefully informs his horrified limo customer, Mary Swanson (Lauren Holly), about his aspirations. Meantime, two thoroughly reprehensible thugs trail them across country. Joe Mentalino (Mike Starr of "Clockers") and J.P. Shay (Karen Duffy of "Reality Bites") are the ruffians in pursuit. Joe suffers from an ulcer, and he lacks a shred of sympathy. After Shay and he break into Harry's apartment to retrieve the valise, Joe twists the head off Harry's pet parakeet Petey. Nevertheless, our heroes manage to eliminate them without realizing the hellacious trouble that they are in. Joe decides to masquerade as a man whose car has broken down on the highway so he can hitch a ride with them. He goes more than he bargained for in the process. The scene at restaurant later on concludes with his demise as the consequence of a prank that Lloyd and Harry play on him. The sight gags are terrific, especially the headlights and Harry's mutt truck, with Carrey and Daniels doing their best 'two stooges' act, and the Farrellys doling out irreverent as well as uneven politically-incorrect humor. The scene when Harry urinates on Lloyd while they are cruising up to Aspen in freezing weather is amusing because like everything else in "Dumb and Dumber" is about incongruity. Our heroes make Forrest Gump look like Albert Einstein. The prequel that followed not long afterward was amusing but it flopped. A belated but side-splitting sequel surfaced 20 years later, with Carrey and Daniels reprising their roles respectively as Lloyd and Harry. The labored gag when Lloyd has to relieved himself with nowhere else to go than a collection of beer bottles and a cop stops them and decides to sample one of their open container is funny, too. To their credit neither actor behave like everything that they are doing is amusing, and Carrey took the cap off one of his front teeth for comic effect. Mind you, this isn't the Farrelly Brothers' best work, but you can see the seeds of their future.