I know who the Farrelly brothers are. Back in high school, they were the ones who set off the stink bomb at the pep rally, clearing the bleachers with choking, vomiting classmates. They were the ones who dropped trou and mooned everyone at the graduation ceremony. They were the ones voted Least Likely to Succeed.
And yet, despite all reason and logic, they have succeeded in Hollywood. For some reason, their fellow classmates—the same ones who once thought Peter and Bobby were a couple of loser-nerds—are eating up their comedies with a spoon.
Gag me with a spoon.
The Farrelly brothers have proved a certain Law of Diminishing Comedy. The more movies they make, the fewer the laughs. When I saw the previews for There’s Something About Mary—you know, the ones that featured clips of the dog diving out the window, the fishing lure in Ben Stiller’s mouth, and so on—I thought it would be a genuinely funny movie. Rarely has a preview been such a bold-faced liar. Sure, there were some very funny bits in There’s Something About Mary…and I saw every one of them in the two-minute trailer.
The previews for Me, Myself & Irene, however, failed to raise even a chuckle, so I knew I was in for an even more humor-free experience when I finally got around to seeing the Jim Carrey three-ring stink bomb circus. I laughed exactly half as much as I did during Mary (which was half as much as I did during the earlier Kingpin). By the time the Brothers Farrelly direct their ninth movie (if they even make it that far), I expect to be armed with rotten tomatoes when I go to the theater (if I even make as far as the theater).
Me, Myself & Irene is little more than a second-rate plot gussied up with gags designed to shock audiences into “Ohmigod, I can’t believe they just showed that!” laughter. And when I say “gags,” I mean that literally. Yes, boys and girls, the Farrellys follow up with their testicle-in-the-zipper jokes with more of the same in this movie. It’s all here: the live chicken up the butt, the defecation-on-the-lawn scene directly followed by the close-up of soft chocolate ice cream, Jim Carrey assaulting a nursing mother on a park bench and ending up with a milk mustache after his slurps at her breast. It’s almost enough to make Porky’s look sophisticated.
Like the rest of the Farrelly filmography, Me, Myself & Irene is militantly low-brow, insisting there’s a sort of comedic poetry to be found in flatulence, genitalia and squirting body fluids. At the head of their efforts here is that most gentle of comedians, Jim Carrey, who has made a career out of physical contortions. As Robin Williams v.2, Carrey’s brand of rubber-body humor would seem to be a good match with the Farrelly mindset. Only trouble is, the story here is so weak that it becomes painfully obvious it’s merely a pegboard on which to hang the jokes.
Carrey plays Charlie Baileygates, a Rhode Island state trooper suffering from “advanced delusional schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage” as a result of his sweetheart wife (Traylor Howard from TV’s Two Guys and a Girl) running off with the black midget chauffeur (a forced-funny character who also wields some mean nunchucks and is a Mensa member). Charlie represses his inner rage, doting on his three sons: three large black boys who are a mix of profane street rap and intellectual genius—the movie’s one forced-funny joke that actually works…at least at first. Charlie’s a sweet guy (as sweet, in fact, as Carrey’s Truman Burbank) and he doesn’t even seem to realize his three boys are products of his wife’s affair with the black midget. To him, his boys just have “year-round tans.”
But time passes and Charlie eventually gets tired of being the butt of the town’s joke. That’s when Hank emerges. As the repressed-anger side of Baileygates, Hank speaks in a Dirty Harry gravel and gets Charlie in trouble whenever he emerges from the psyche. Most of Hank’s shenanigans involve the humor of scatology and genitalia, so you can imagine how much the Farrellys loved it whenever he was on screen. The plot, so to speak, takes off when Hank is assigned to escort the beautiful-but-bland Irene (Renee Zellweger who does little more than show up for work, read her lines, then collect a paycheck) back to her home in upstate New York where she faces some trumped-up traffic charge, courtesy of her mob-connected boyfriend in a subplot that goes exactly nowhere.
Me, Myself & Irene is little more than a romantic road comedy, spiced up with giggly-boy humor and Carrey’s physical shtick. Fortunately, Carrey is the movie’s one saving grace. As always, it’s mildly fun to watch his rubber-boned antics, especially when Hank and Charlie both emerge at the same time and wrestle each other. But even that eventually wears thin, along with the rest of the painstakingly constructed jokes. After all, if you’ve seen one chicken-in-the-butt joke, you’ve seen them all, right?
Recommended:
No
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age
An outrageous comedy from the Farrelly Brothers, the film centers around a mild-mannered Rhode Island cop (Carrey) with split-personality disorder who...More at HotMovieSale.com
Jim Carrey delivers a hysterical performance in this fall-down, flat-out, irresistibly deranged movie (Rolling Stone). Rhode Island state trooper Char...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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