Dumb and Dumber To

Dumb and Dumber To; comedy, USA, 2014; D: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly, S: Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Kathleen Turner, Laurie Holden, Rob Riggle, Rachel Melvin, Don Lake, Steve Tom, Tembi Locke, Brady Bluhm, Paul Blackthorne, Bill Murray 

For 20 years, Harry is visiting his friend Lloyd in a mental asylum, who was left allegedly paralyzed in a wheelchair after Mary broke up with him. However, Lloyd finally reveals to Harry that he was just playing a prank on him for the last 20 years, and that he was OK all along. Back home, Harry receives a letter from a woman he slept with, Fraida, who informs him that he has a daughter, Penny who was adopted by a famous scientist, Bernard, 22 years ago. Harry and Lloyd embark on a road trip to El Paso for the KEN conference to meet Harry's daughter. At the same time, Bernard's wife Adele and her lover Travis are trying to kill Harry, Lloyd and Penny so that Adele can inherit his large fortune. The police stop that, however, and Adele is arrested, while Fraida reveals that Penny is not Harry's daughter, but that she just deceived him.

20 years after the hyped, vulgar, crude, yet rather funny 1st film, directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly actually attempted a very late sequel which is decent — equally as vulgar and crude as the original, just less funny. The introduction to the two lead characters, and what they were doing for the last 20 years, is just outrageously insane enough to justify the return to their story, though the storyline loses a lot of inspiration in the 2nd half which copies too many jokes already seen in "Dumb and Dumber" whereas it offers a terrible, cop-out ending which just simply aborts a character arc for Harry and Lloyd and leaves them without a proper conclusion. In that sense, this sequel could have worked better as a short film than a overstretched feature. Some of the jokes are also terrible, with the grandmother in the retirement home sequence reaching a low point of the entire series. The Farrellys still prove to have some remains of a sixth sense for comedy here and there, and thus, luckily, some of the jokes in the first half are hilarious: the one where a Meth cook (Bill Murray in a cameo hidden behind a Hazmat suit) prepares his goods, and a cat randomly jumps to lick the drug, only for the "drugged" pet to be later seen hanging from a chandelier in the background, is a small comic highlight, almost worthy of the Marx brothers, while another wonderful joke is when Harry and Lloyd meet the 50-year old Fraida and ask her to identify herself since the young Fraida they knew has a "smiley face" tattoo on her back — she shows her back, and it now has a "sad face" due to her saggy skin. Jim Carrey is again in good shape and shows his hunch as a comedian, though Jeff Daniels is his worthy partner. Overall, a solid sequel, with a few funny moments, though it is a pity that the characters were not expanded, and instead just stayed one-dimensional caricatures.

Grade;+