It's hard to believe that it's actually been almost a decade since the first Dumb and Dumber, which was deservedly a smash hit, was released on the unsuspecting populace. I can see it now. I was in tenth grade, and I still remember ditching class in beautiful Irvine, California to ride my bicycle over to Fashion Island in Newport Beach so my friend and I could steal bubble gum from one of the ritzy drugstores and then go see this movie, which we must have seen in the theaters half a dozen times or so. Where we got the money I've been trying to remember for years.
I'd like to start out by saying that I don't know that the prequel to the brilliant Dumb and Dumber (easily one of the most hilarious comedies to come along in decades) really deserves all of the vicious reviews that it has received from professional and amateur critics alike. It has been a popular and critical disaster from the day it was released, and while it's true that it is simply a bad, bad movie, I think that anyone claiming it to be 'absolutely THE worst movie I've EVER seen' might be exaggerating just a little bit. Or maybe I've just seen worse movies than these people. I've seen some seriously bad movies, and while Dumb and Dumberer is certainly an embarrassing flop, I've seen worse. It's better than Scary Movie 2 and 3 combined, for example.
That being said, on to the crapfests. Dumb and Dumberer, since I have neither the energy nor interest to research the intentions, strikes me almost unmistakably as one of those movies that one studio makes of another studio's movie. Kind of like how Pixar just publicly insulted Disney at the same time as they ended the two companies' partnership, and Pixar promptly announced that they would be making Toy Story 3. I expect Toy Story 3 may be a disaster (if the 'threat' was serious), possibly even purposely, in order to get back at Disney. I don't know that this prequel to Dumb and Dumber was done for revenge at all, but I can't say that it's all that mysterious as to why the original cast and crew had little to nothing to do with it.
That being said, I have to say that I'm impressed with the actors they found to play the younger Harry and Lloyd, especially Lloyd, because this guy, without the bowl-cut and the chipped tooth, looks NOTHING like Jim Carrey's Lloyd, but in the movie he's the spitting image. This is one of the reasons that I think the movie deserves at least minor respect. At least the casting director was on the ball. Sadly, it's all downhill from there. I have to admit that I was pretty happy to see Bob Saget acting again. Granted, I barely remember him in Full House at all and I saw his one spoken line in Half Baked as the official end of his acting career, but I loved his cheesy jokes on America's Funniest Home Videos (the ORIGINAL show) so much that seeing him on screen again was almost like a trip back to my childhood.
And then Harry had a little incident involving chocolate, and I started to squirm in my seat, as I'm sure many other people started to do, given the reviews I've read. It is expected that some memorable scene from the original film would be almost duplicated in a sequel like this, but Harry getting diarrhea in the original movie was funny because it was there for a reason. Lloyd put massive amounts of laxative in Harry's tea to get revenge on him for dating the girl that he was after. Crude, yes, but still funny. In this movie, Harry goes nuts with the chocolate in the bathroom and then Jessica's poor dad (Bob Saget) comes in and screams a numbing stream of profanity about there being feces all over his bathroom. Not only is this supposed to be funny, but there is so much stock put into this idea that it's duplicated again later in the film.
It's sad that a comedy as smashing and brilliant as Dumb and Dumber has been followed up by such a stupid, stupid film. While I admit that you can hardly expect for them to have created something as great as Dumb and Dumber again, I really didn't think that they could have come up with something THIS bad. I mean, just the name itself should have inspired some better ideas for the movie. Sadly, it seems that the powers that be were more interested in throwing a sequel out there than they were in actually making it deserve its title.
And when a movie isn't good enough to deserve a title like Dumb & Dumberer, it's a bad, bad sign.
