They don't make comedies like they used to...

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2004)

...that is, comedies used to make the audience laugh.
"There's Something About Mary" is a spectacularly un-funny film, with no plot development, characters that are a mystery (I guess partly because they're not worth caring about in the first place), writing that is on the level of 5th grade boys telling dirty jokes on a campout, direction that is - well, direction-less, and a meandering storyline that doesn't entice the viewer to care about where the movie is going. By switching early on who is driving the story (Ben Stiller to Matt Dillon) the audience is confused as to what's going on, then when switching back to Stiller, the 'situations' that Stiller gets in when trying to hook up with Mary (who just seems to be in whatever scene doing whatever actions the script called for, without any semblance of belonging ever) are contrived, juvenile, and insulting to the intelligence.
Why anyone beyond the preview audience went to see this movie is beyond me; even "The Haunted Mansion" which was criminally un-funny had more laughs than this reject from a garbage disposal.
If more viewers would discover the classics of comedy - Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and other greats, then talentless hacks like the Farelly's would no longer be forcing such tripe on the American public, and truly funny pictures would be shown at theatres.