Hysteria aside, this is actually worth the time; a messy and full-of-mayhem piece covering several bases at once as well as certain others I'm not even sure it knows exist.

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2012)

There's Something About Mary is a healthy mix of content which doesn't really work with that of rounded, authentic laughs; of situational comedy which is most certainly at times very funny with that of meaner, cruder humour which most certainly is not. The whole thing just about forges together into a film worth one's time, although looses energy when its lead does indeed catch up with a particular girl whom he has always liked, but has nary seen for the best part of ten years. The film is well worth the effort when the humour revolving around a case of two separate instances of deceptive identity is in full flow; other things, such as dramatic reveals and twists feel present more for the absurd pomp and circumstance of it all, do not work as well. Irregardless, the film's odd air of genre hybridisation, as classical Hollywood-era noir appears to crash head on with latter-part 20th Century gross out comedic laughs, is infectious at the best times and only moderately annoying at the worst – it boils down into something worth seeing.
We cover a perilous and injustice-ridden quest involving Ben Stiller's rounded and generally bang-up guy, Ted Stroehmann. At the core of the film are his desperate attempts to first get back to the girl of both his youth and of his dreams in the titular Mary, before then proceed to try and win her heart all over again. Along the way, narcissistic and unpleasant men try to sabotage his chances. Mary is the woman in question, and she's played by Cameron Diaz; a woman we observe cycling in the prologue when it was still the 1980s and the main players were all still at high school. She trundles along to said place of study donning a radiant smile; beautiful hair and bright attire - her scopophilic qualities reiterated by all of those whom gaze upon her, and she blots out the unglamourous looking other women as she peddles along.
One of those eyeing her is Stiller's aforementioned Ted; a guy revealed to be a little different to that of the rest of the ogling kids, even if he begins out on a similar plain. This differentiation occurs when he steps in on a situation in which a boy at the school with special needs is undergoing a bit of a trauma. Helping him out and bringing calm to the situation, it transpires the boy is Mary's brother and upon thanking him for intervening, poor Ted's feelings for her are implemented to the point that the rest of his life will be largely defined her presence (or lack of) in it in some capacity. The fact the film takes Ted from sharing a domain built on voyeurism as well as an unadulterated lust to know Mary more personally before, most likely, move onto the next woman, and then onto the places he eventually ends up helps move the film away from accusations of it being crasser than it actually is.
Things kick off when Ted scores a date to the school-ending prom for his actions involving Mary's sibling, although it all goes spectacularly wrong when he heads over to pick her up and ends in such a disaster that he does not see her again for the duration that allows him to get to the age of being the late-twenty-something-year-old author he is. Desperate, he hires Matt Dillon's private detective Pat Healy to find her and report back. Dillon plays a man with a big gold watch; a little tickle moustache; nudey calenders on the walls of his office and a set of general characteristics that just scream "avoid". What Healy does is bend the reality of Mary's looks and situation to allow for him to advance on the unbeknown Mary himself, something made more complicated by the presence of Lee Evans' character: a paraplegic English academic. Acting out of fondness, Ted takes to the road and goes to find her anyway.
From this premise, The American filmmaking duo of The Farrelly brothers spin an often humorous film within which we are surprised by how much we actually come to care for what transpires. The Farrelly's actually do well to demonstrate their credentials as filmmakers and prove their ability to time a joke, thus moving the film away from just a flurry of cheap puns more suited to a secondary school playground, during the set up wherein there is a particular edit so well timed that the laugh is in the cut itself and manages to draw attention away from what was otherwise meant to be an instance in which the reveal of a man's semi-veiled genitalia filling the frame was designed to induce giggles. Most of the film's energy, though, does indeed derive from these early segments when we will Stiller on to get to where Mary is and in Dillon's laughable facade. The film could almost certainly be recommended on a level of laughs, in spite of its often veering sources for these laughs; but it is the bends and curves in the narrative as things develop, twinned with one of the more likable leads from memory driving a film of this ilk, which keep it treading water.