Shocking the first time, boring the next

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2003)

It's hard to deny that there's something charming about this pop grossout comedy. Like so many sick-joke aggregations before it, its heart seems genuinely to be in the right place, and all the actors turn in amiable, sympathetic performances.
But ideally a comedy should get funnier upon repeat viewings, and you really can't say that at all here. The laughs it creates come entirely from the shock of seeing them for the first time. Oh my God, look at that semen on his ear! Oh my God, look at those eruptions on Chris Elliott's face! Oh my God, look at Magda's breasts! Creating these kinds of shock effects, and doing it without alienating the audience's sympathies, is not a small achievement--just ask John Waters or the Monty Python troupe how hard it is. But it is not, perhaps, a great one either, and when I saw it again last night, I thought, oh, there's the semen on his ear. There's the eruptions on Chris Elliott's face. Sigh. Yawn. Et cetera.
The difference between `There's Something About Mary' and a John Waters or Python film might be that Waters and the Pythons have always used shock to make a point about something, to comment in irreverent or even offensive ways on some aspect of modern culture (usually critically). The Farrellys don't set their sights quite so high, and that's fine, but it results in a picture that doesn't give the audience anything to want to relive. It's a parade of grostesquerie with a heart, yes, but really without substance or real style. Even the technical stuff doesn't stand up--I kept thinking how much funnier the dog-battle scene would have been if Barry Sonnenfeld, or somebody more proficient with a camera, had shot it.
What reason, exactly, would anyone have for watching this movie more than once? It feels remarkably empty, and has already dated badly after just five years. (I don't doubt that in twenty years people will watch this movie again and not be able to remember what they used to enjoy about it.) You might as well be listening to somebody describe its events as watching it, because in the end it's a movie in which the ideas are shocking, but everything else is quite ordinary. 5.5 out of 10.