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Director: Bobby and Peter Farrelly
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) has spent the last 20 years catatonic in a nursing home. His friend Harry (Jeff Daniels) has visited him every week for the last two decades. When Harry informs Lloyd that this will be his last week visiting due to an illness that will take him out of commission, Lloyd breaks out of his catatonic state and yells "Gotcha!," as he has been faking the whole time. Harry then tells Lloyd about his illness and that he needs a kidney transplant. They decide to ask Harry's parents to donate a kidney to save him but are shocked to find that Harry is adopted and that the Chinese couple before him is not his biological parents, meaning they won't be a donor match. Since Harry hadn't been home in over 20 years, he had some old mail, including a postcard from his old girlfriend Fraida Felcher (Kathleen Turner), informing him that she was pregnant and she needed to see him. This means Harry might be a father, which means a possible kidney match. They come to learn Fraida gave her daughter up for adoption, so they set out on another road trip, this time to find Harry's estranged daughter and hopefully a new kidney.
We are very much aware that humor is subjective from person to person. The thing about comedy movies and movie critics together is that most critics don't take well to comedies because they are stuffy "shirts" who want to pick them apart based on things that aren't the laugh factor. The bottom line is that humor, no matter what, has to actually be funny in order to be considered comedy. Is that not the basic criterion for any joke to be considered a joke? Critics need to ease up a little bit when it comes to comedies, because most of the time, they aren't fans and sometimes, unfoundedly so.
Regardless of your subjective humor and whether or not we just happen to be a couple of people who review movies, this movie is straight-up not funny. At all. Hardly anyone at our movie theater laughed, and we didn't even laugh once. NOT ONCE. ZERO TIMES. In almost 2 hours. Can you imagine what that must be like for people who love watching funny movies? To not laugh is to not breathe. Not only was it not funny, but it made us angry, too.
It's hard to say that this film was a disappointing failure 20 years in the making because filmmakers waited so long to produce a sequel for the masses. Even if they had waited only 10 years, it probably would have been 10 years too long. When we first heard that "Dumb and Dumber" was getting a sequel after such a long time, we were a little concerned, to say the least. When we actually saw the trailer, it didn't ease that concern one freaking bit. The trailer looked dreadful. It had been so long since the first film, we wondered why bother releasing a sequel at all, and as we mentioned before, it seems like it was a money grab on the part of not just Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, but the Farrelly brothers as well. And yet, they pushed on through the skepticism, and even after the dismal knockoff prequel, there is no way their sequel could be as bad as that, right? We decided to watch the original "Dumb and Dumber" again recently and it still made us laugh, so at least we have fond memories of that, we guess. We entered the theater with tepid expectations and an open mind in the hopes it would come even a little, just a little close to the original...Unfortunately, all of those hopes were quickly dashed, and as we mentioned above, in the 1 hour and 50-minute runtime, including the after credit scene, we laughed a grand total of ZERO! times. Joke after joke fell flat and the entire movie as a whole was eye-rolling, groan-worthy, and often disgusting as opposed to being funny. There are no "but at least there was that one-moment" moments. It's all terrible. BigJ mentioned to me about halfway through the film that my reactions to what we were watching were funnier than the actual movie itself.
Besides a recycled plot, rehashed one-liners from the original movie and stupid running gags throughout (IE: pushing people into bushes = comedy?????), Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were terrible in this movie. They are playing parodies of Harry and Lloyd rather than just playing Harry and Lloyd. Part of the reason why the first film worked at all relied so heavily on the comedic timing and delivery of these two actors. There is no comedic timing and no good delivery as far as the eye can see in this sequel. In the first film, the duo were stupid and oblivious, but nowhere near as stupid and oblivious as they are here. They are dumbed-down so much that you wonder how they function or even feed themselves. It's less silly-stupid and more "these people cannot possibly function alone in the real world" stupid. Lloyd has been turned into an even bigger, meaner asshole with Harry as his now even dumber sidekick. There was a little bit of an innocence to the duo in the original, which was has been completely erased here in lieu of absurdity, calculated meanness, and dumbassery. Beyond the slew of basic, menial, moronic fart/poop/pee/butthole/dick/hand trapped in dusty old lady vagina jokes, some of the humor in this movie is downright offensive, and what's not offensive is just fucking empty. It's basically 2 hours worth of unfulfilled potential and a massive letdown for those who actually wanted a sequel. The supporting cast isn't much better. The only person who ever got us close to cracking a smile the entire time was Rob Riggle with a stellar camouflage body paint.
Not all the blame falls on the actors here. It's not like they had anything decent to work with and it's not like the writing was top-notch to being with. Gone are the days when Jim Carrey was the 20 million dollar man and Jeff Daniels actually acted with integrity. The Farrelly brothers should be ashamed of themselves, not just for this movie, but for the many, many, many pieces of shit they have made in their lifetime. After hefty expectations from die-hard fans, this is simply another movie that can be added to the seemingly never-ending pile of filthy for no point, unoriginal and rehashed, poorly acted stink bomb cash-grab movies. This is a fucking disaster, and we've seen "Left Behind" this year. It's really no wonder why Bill Murray wanted to be hidden behind a meth-making mask because I wouldn't want to be associated with this train-wreck either. Genuinely one of the worst movies we have seen in our lifetime.
My Rating: 1/10 (1 point for Rob Riggle)
BigJ's Rating: 1/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 27%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
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