Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; comedy, USA, 1994; D: Tom Shadyac, S: Jim Carrey, Courteney Cox, Sean Young, John Capodice, Troy Evans, Dan Marino, Udo Kier

Ace Ventura is a sleazy pet detective specialized in tracking down lost animals. His newest case is to find Snowflake, a dolphin and a mascot of the football team Miami Dolphins, that was abducted by someone. As he gets close with Miami Dolphins assistant Melissa, Ace finds a clue: a tiny jewel that fell from someone's ring. It turns out Lt. Louis Einhorn is behind the kidnapping: namely, before her surgery, she was a man, Ray Finkle, who played for the Dolphins but was replaced by someone else. Ace stops her and saves the dolphin.

Tom Shadyac's directorial film debut "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" is a simple and wacky comedy that established a new star: it is Jim Carrey's breakthrough role, after 11 years of unnoticed career. Carrey takes this role that was intended to be over-the-top and plays it even more over-the-top, as a live action cartoon, deliberately obnoxious, which makes it even funnier. He is simply a riot: every move he makes is exaggerated, as he is playing something like Elvis Presley playing Philip Marlowe playing Bugs Bunny. It's like a 12-year old conjured up an imaginary role and now plays it as a grown up, not caring at all what anyone will think. The whole movie stands and falls with him. Some moments are simply hilarious, like the scene where he is in the police precinct, some officer comments ("Lassie must be missing!"), and then Aguado, his rival, insults him, and Ventura just laughs while almost not moving his upper lips at all, and then even has the iconic moment where he "talks" with his butt in the office ("I'd like to ass you a few questions"). Carrey acts like a caricature all the time, and thus some part of the viewers might perceive it as an overkill that becomes old and worn out in the second half. If he played his role seriously for at least 50 % of the time, the other half of his performance would have some kind of sense, but even in this edition, it is impossible to deny that he left a trail of some sort of unforgettable energy on the screen, even by today's standards. The plot is thin, the author's style almost non-existent, the tone childish (the scene where Ventura catches a bullet shot at him with his mouth is a joke that was already seen several times before), the ending is disastrously transphobic, yet the whole film is only designed to make you chuckle, in any way it can, and in that regard it succeeds ("If I'm not back in 5 minutes...just wait longer"). Carrey's performance is one of those rare ones that are played deliberately embarassing, yet end up unexpectedly helpful in the final comic output.

Grade:++