Dumb Again: DUMB AND DUMBER TO

Now that the twenty-year-old comedy Dumb and Dumber has a sequel, it’s perhaps better to think of the pair as harkening back to the comedy teams of Hollywood’s first half-century, and not just because writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly made a (pretty good) Three Stooges movie in the interim. Like the Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, and the rest made films that often had plots held together by tape and wishful thinking, really just an excuse for likeable and familiar character types to do their thing. The problem with Dumb and Dumber To from where I sit is simply that I never liked the dummies. Some of the antics Harry (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd (Jim Carrey) get into – casual misunderstandings, juvenile pranks, ridiculous tunnel vision – are funny, but on the whole they’re a couple of creepy guys who spend the entire first film essentially trying to stalk a woman across the country. I’ve never found it all that entertaining.

The new film goes down easier, maybe because the guys are in their late 50s and what was creepy and off-putting for younger dummies looks almost endearing when it’s a couple of slower, sweeter older guys. (Almost. Sometimes.) Carrey puts on the bowl cut and chipped tooth while Daniels makes his hair a tousled mess as they step right back into the rumpled outfits of Harry and Lloyd. They’re just as dumb as ever, but this time the woman they’re stumbling across the country to find is Harry’s long-lost grown daughter (Rachel Melvin). It’s not quite as creepy a prospect, since the man’s in desperate need of a kidney replacement and thinks she’d be a match. He just learned about her existence that day, but, hey, he needs to make up for lost time. There’s an unfortunate subplot about Lloyd having the hots for the twenty-something’s picture, but at least it’s not the central engine of plot here.

So To is a little less gross in that respect, though there’s still a whiff of sexism here and there. But in the realm of the gross out gag, the Farrely brothers make a bid to retain their throne. Their eagerness to offend with the lowest of lowbrow is what makes them so cheerfully funny at their best, so deathly disgusting at worst. There’s nothing here as funny as There’s Something About Mary’s hair gel or Hall Pass’s fart joke, which is among the greatest in cinema history, though I must confess my memory about such things isn’t the best. What Dumber To is is staggeringly dirty, taking the PG-13 so much farther then I ever thought possible. That’s a dubious honor. The Farrelys take the rating system, stretch it, bend it, break it, toss it out the window, and pee on it. Sometimes it’s over the line in a way I begrudgingly respected, but not reliably.

This is a movie that makes use of several types of bodily fluids, adolescent entendres, and anatomical hijinks. At one point there’s a dream sequence in which Lloyd imagines defeating a ninja by using a bullwhip to rip off his opponent’s testicles, which he then holds up with a gloating grin. You could hear the disbelief in the audience. But then, I was the one cackling when a guy gets run over by a train, and when a blind man finds something horribly gory has happened to his exotic birds. So you win some, you lose some, I suppose. A few times, I laughed so hard I questioned my sanity. The rest of the time I questioned the filmmakers. It’s hit and miss.

The movie contains a helpful metaphor for what’s so essentially wrong with it. There’s a scene in which Harry and Lloyd stumble upon the furry dog-shaped vehicle that they gave away in the first film. They’re happy to see it, and it’s nice to see a familiar sight, even if it’s not as good as they remembered. They take off down the road, and the whole thing falls apart instantly. Just like the movie itself, which takes a familiar sight and proceeds to fall apart the instant the rubber hits the road. It doesn’t hang together as a movie. It barely hangs together as a collection of gags and jokes. But what is pleasant and often funny is the Farrely’s commitment and enjoyment in constructing their goofy anything-goes moments, reveling in the dumbness. We could use more of that prime brightly lit, good-natured Farrely slapstick vulgarity in comedies today. That, not the dummies, is what I responded to seeing on the big screen again. Well, that and Kathleen Turner, who has a small role, and is a welcome sight.

A real mixed bag, Dumb and Dumber To at least held my interest. Even when I felt my frustration rising at its more derisible moments, I was only fleetingly grumpy about it. I could sit through some weak patches to get to the better tomfoolery. It’s a buyer-beware sort of movie, not good enough to recommend, but hard to avoid giving the wink and the nod to the people who just might find the bad worth braving to see this brand of humor. It’s certainly not for everyone. Take the couple sitting behind me whose date went south fast as the movie played. I reproduce the best of their argument below for your benefit, since it’s a shame this won’t be available as a bonus audio track come time for the home video release.

She: “This is awful!”

He: “Shhhh!”

She:  “Don’t hush me. This is friggin’ filthy!”

She stormed out and he, as far as I could tell, sat through the rest of the movie.

Nyuck to the Future: THE THREE STOOGES

Writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, from their early efforts Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary to more recent works like Stuck on You and last year’s giggling sex farce Hall Pass, have a commitment to broad slapstick and gross-out gags. So it makes a certain amount of sense that their long-in-development passion project is The Three Stooges, a lowest-common-denominator exhumation of silly, second-rate mid-20th century vaudevillian nonsense. You’d think that seeing Larry, Moe and Curly impersonators stumble around modern-day settings doing their same old eye-poking, pun-spitting, kicking, stomping, and whoop-whoop-whooping routine would be at best misguided, at worst unbearable. That’s almost the case here and yet there’s something so gleefully goofy and ecstatically, old-fashioned juvenile about the film that it ends up being something closer to warmhearted fan fiction, a tribute to childhood idols of a dubious kind.

The plot, such as it is, rests on a Catholic orphanage where the three little stooges were dropped off and subsequently raised. The patient nuns are the very funny Jane Lynch, Oscar-winning American Idol alum Jennifer Hudson, who gets a short musical number, Sports Illustrated’s latest swimsuit issue cover girl Kate Upton, and Larry David. Yes, that Larry David. They’re exasperated with the guys’ antics, but somehow, twenty-five years later, the guys are still hanging around. The Farrellys don’t really care to explain exactly why the guys are such weird anachronisms right out of the womb, leading to a sometimes off-putting mix of contemporary references and moments when the Stooges are utterly dumbfounded by modernity. What’s going on here? They have no clue what an iPhone is, but they know who C-3PO is? You just have to throw up your hands and go with it.

What’s especially surprising, and makes it easier to just go along with the movie’s silliness, is how skillfully the main cast inhabits the roles of the Stooges. At first, they seem to be ever so slightly not quite right, but as the movie went on I grew accustomed to them. They’re doing admirable work in a tough spot. Sean Hayes plays Larry with a scrunched up face and drawn out delivery while Chris Diamantopoulos squints and schemes from beneath a flat, black mop of hair as Moe. Meanwhile, Will Sasso delivers a pitch-perfect Curly, wiggling his bulk around with squirmy grace and fluidity while manipulating his voice with a squeaky falsetto. In other words, they’re the Stooges. They smack each other around with exaggerated sound effects and bumble through life spreading (somewhat unintentional) destruction, much to the consternation of those around them.

When the events of the plot finally kick into motion, it’s revealed that the orphanage is over $800,000 dollars in debt. The trio decides to set off to raise the money and save the orphans. (That one cute little orphan is also sick with a mysterious disease may be a bit too nakedly manipulative and heavy for such an otherwise bouncy lark.) It’s a fairly dusty premise, which only adds to the sense that the movie has been sucked through a hole in the space-time continuum and arrived at just the right speed and location to smack me upside the head. I sat dumbfounded as often as I was amused. It’s all just so straight-ahead slapstick and brightly lit episodic tomfoolery. The Farrellys can’t indulge in their usual R-rated sight gags, but that’s no loss here, since that’s not their intent. Besides, there are plenty of icky moments, like a scene in a nursery with urinating infants, or a scene in which a lion is hit in the boing-loings by a peanut shot out of a dolphin’s blowhole. There’s definitely a creeping sense of the surreal here. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t.

As the movie goes this way and that, sorting itself into three loose episodes differentiated by titles in the style of the old Stooges’ shorts, the Farrellys find plenty more hoary old story elements to utilize. There’s a cartoonish femme fatale (Sophia Vergara) involved in a murder plot that ropes in the Stooges and runs throughout the remainder of the film, though, given how much punishment these characters take without consequence, it’s an oddly low-stakes murder plot. There’s also a smarmy lawyer (Stephen Collins) and his slightly dimwitted son (Kirby Heyborne), not to mention a goofy thug (Craig Bierko), bumbling cops, a stern nurse, and a party full of snooty rich people and other eccentric types including a thickly accented French baker.

It’s a movie in which most jokes, simply by the nature of the story and the caricatures, can be seen coming from a mile away. Sometimes, these jokes just aren’t very funny and yet when they land, they land hard. When they did, I found myself laughing despite myself. A fairly early sequence that builds with exceptional escalation starts with the Stooges trying to fix a church steeple and culminates in a church bell sliding down and smacking a nun in head. Moe wonders who their victim was. Curly squeaks, “I dunno, but her face rings a bell!”

There’s something sort of sweet about the way the Farrellys pay tribute to the Stooges, in its own way like what Jason Segel and company did with The Muppets. For me, a little Three Stooges goes a long way whether they be new or old, but the enthusiasm of this movie is borderline contagious. The Farrelly brothers lovingly recreate the kind of slapdash, repetitive, hit-and-miss silliness of the Three Stooges while trying to say that the world today could use some good, uncomplicated pratfalls and broad wordplay now and then. An extended goofy plot point in the middle of the movie finds Moe accidentally becoming the newest cast member of Jersey Shore. It’s an odd moment – one that feels miscalculated and stale already – but it also serves as the film’s statement of purpose of sorts. As Moe smacks around these tanned, shallow, callow reality show stars, I could almost hear the Farrellys arguing that the popular shallow of old beats the popular shallow of today any day.