Dumb and Dumber To

DUMB AND DUMBER TO (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 2014)

In DUMB AND DUMBER TO Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) has been institutionalized for two decades, although his infirmity has been a extensive practical joke he’s been pulling on his best friend Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), who has faithfully visited and changed his diapers every Wednesday. When Harry informs Lloyd that he can’t come any longer because of his own medical condition, the prank is revealed, leaving them to tackle Harry’s issue together.

Harry needs a kidney transplant. Lloyd isn’t keen to give him one of his, but they may have found a solution when they learn Harry is the father of an early twentysomething daughter he never knew he had. The girl’s mother Fraida (Kathleen Turner) gave her up for adoption to a scientist and his wife but does know where she lives. The boys leave Rhode Island to find Penny (Rachel Melvin) only to arrive at her home after she’s departed to make a presentation at a technology conference in El Paso for her ill, Nobel Prize-winning father (Steve Tom). Penny left Dr. Pinchelow’s invention behind, so the two numbskulls are entrusted to deliver it to her as Harry pursues a daughter and donor and Lloyd seeks a bride.

For a film in which a fair amount of the humor involves what goes in and comes out of orifices, DUMB AND DUMBER TO manages to seem inoffensive despite its crudity. The vulgar comedic ingenuity includes a cat’s feathery flatulence and a father’s hilariously inappropriate advice for dealing with menstruation. DUMB AND DUMBER TO serves as a good example of how limitations can work in a comedy’s favor, even one that employs shock value. Although it’s astonishing that the gag with an elderly woman in a nursing home was permitted in a PG-13 film, the rating requires a certain amount of nuance and cleverness that more graphic language and visuals don’t need. The laughs are produced from the tension between what’s suggested and shown. Frankly, it seems like the film gets away with more because it leads the audience to fill in the blanks rather than pounding us over the head with the jokes’ climaxes.

As Lloyd explains to Harry regarding his 20-year prank, some things are funnier the longer the punchline is delayed. Co-writers and directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly smartly execute low humor through constructed gags with several small rewards before the big payoffs. In the case of Harry’s pleasant memory being reproduced on a screen, the funniest aspect isn’t the filthy capper but an aside about shutting the door. DUMB AND DUMBER TO’s greater strength may be in the silly literalness with which its characters interact with the world, though. True to the film’s title the jokes are often dumb, like Lloyd and Harry pedaling their bicycle while it’s mounted on a bus’s rack, and dumber, such as a play on words with a highway named after an actress, but they’re delivered with such brio that it’s hard to resist the stupidity.

The Farrellys and four other credited screenwriters throw plenty of coarse jokes against the wall and many stick, but the film has patchy stretches, especially after Lloyd and Harry reach their destination. The plot merely serves as an excuse to link sketches involving the twosome acting like doofuses and thus doesn’t provide much momentum. Whenever it seems like DUMB AND DUMBER TO may be stalling out, along comes a puerile wisecrack or two to sustain the good will it was starting to lose.

The Farrellys put a good bit of craft in DUMB AND DUMBER TO, even if their film is just an elevated version of kids in the cafeteria trying to crack up their friends. It’s as simple and amusing as watching Carrey wolf down a hot dog as though he’s Homer Simpson and then wiping his mouth with the bun that he throws away.

Grade: B-

The Three Stooges

THE THREE STOOGES (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 2012)

Directors and brothers Bobby and Peter Farrelly revive the cinematic hijinks of three idiot siblings in THE THREE STOOGES.  Split into three linked episodes, the film begins with baby brothers Moe, Larry, and Curly being tossed from a speeding car onto a Catholic orphanage’s doorstep.  The oddball boys struggle to win the hearts of adoptive parents, especially if they come as a package deal, so thirty-odd years later they’re still living with the good sisters and fellow parentless kids.

How much longer Moe (Chris Diamantopoulos), Larry (Sean Hayes), and Curly (Will Sasso) can stay is in doubt.  The orphanage needs $830,000 in short order to keep its doors open.  The boys volunteer to raise the money and head into the big city to save their home.

Fortune shines on them, or so they think, when a buxom woman and her supposed husband wish to hire them to ease his pain with a mercy killing.  Why, the couple is even seeking to pay the exact amount the orphanage needs for a night’s work.  Lydia (Sofia Vergara) and Mac (Craig Bierko), who is really her lover, want the Stooges to bump off her wealthy husband, but in the knuckleheads’  typical fashion, they bungle the job.  As they fail to earn the necessary cash, dissension divides their ranks.

THE THREE STOOGES is a rare modern slapstick film that succeeds with remarkable consistency.  There’s nothing new in the way these three galoots sling puns and cause hilarious physical pain to one another and anyone unfortunate to wander into their vicinity.  The Farrellys even borrow the comedic sound effects from the original shorts to punctuate all those eye pokes and knocking heads.  The terrifically timed, well-executed silliness is embraced without irony or any greater sense of purpose.  It delivers what it promises: scene after scene of low comedy done with relish.

Years ago it was reported that THE THREE STOOGES would star Jim Carrey, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro.  Who knows what that unrealized alternate version would have looked like, but those top shelf actors would have been hard-pressed to come through any better than the less familiar stars who got the roles.  Diamantopoulos dons Moe’s bowl cut like a general’s stars and takes authoritative lead of this misfit trio with his rapidly barked orders and deployment of slaps and gouges.  Like a linebacker doing ballet, Sasso brings grace and innocence to Curly as the physical manifestation of the unfiltered id.  Hayes sounds like a dead ringer for the original Larry, and he slides comfortably into the laid-back, old-beyond-his-years manner that defines his personality and prematurely receding hairline.  The kid Moe, Larry, and Curly, played by Skyler Gisondo, Lance Chantiles-Wertz, and Robert Capron, do bang-up interpretations too.

THE THREE STOOGES is a celebration of the stupid that hits one square in the gut, yet the Farrellys ensure that none of the comedic violence feels malicious, even when the victims are easily scorned JERSEY SHORE cast members.  It’s all good fun that connects on a base level.  A nun is accidentally bonked in the face with the head of a sledgehammer.  The Stooges fend off hospital staff and security by wielding newborns producing prodigious urine streams.  The dimwitted trio ruins a golf course and kills who knows how many fish when they misinterpret what it means to get into the farm-raised salmon business.

The flatly shot STOOGES leaves much to be desired visually, but there is plenty to admire in the sharply constructed gags and anarchic spirit powering this lowbrow laugher.  The Farrellys have made a dumb movie, but it takes real skill to be this good at being brainless.

Grade: B

Hall Pass

HALL PASS (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 2011)

At first wandering eyes and rampant sex talk from married men Rick (Owen Wilson) and Fred (Jason Sudeikis) earn them withering looks and chastising from their wives. Eventually such juvenile behavior gets each of them a so-called “hall pass” from their spouses. They are given a guilt-free week off from their marital commitments to do as they please, including sleeping with other women if the opportunities present themselves.

Their disgusted wives Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate) are following the advice of a friend who suggests that Rick and Fred have inflated senses of their virility and attractiveness. The hall pass functions as a reverse psychology tool that will ultimately provide them with renewed appreciation for the relationships they have and disabuse them of their lustful manners.

While their wives are away, Rick and Fred hit the town with their gawking buddies to flex the old ladykilling muscles. Having envisioned seven days of debauchery, they check into a hotel to keep from soiling their homes, but in reality these two talk a bigger game than they can play. They prove themselves inept at hitting on women. Most nights they’re ready to hit the sack well before last call.

Despite their incompetent flirting, Rick appears to be making some headway with Australian barista Leigh (Nicky Whelan) while Fred’s desperation lowers his initially high selectivity. Meanwhile, Maggie and Grace are forced to examine their willingness to grant the hall passes when they find guys putting the moves on them.

HALL PASS directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who are also among the four credited screenwriters, have made a career finding humanity among the crude and outrageous. Amid the puerile gags in THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, KINGPIN, and DUMB AND DUMBER, the films also possess a generosity of spirit for the foolish characters. HALL PASS features the Farrellys’ familiar combination of vulgarity and sweetness, but this time around the brothers mostly miss the mark.

HALL PASS plays like a third or fourth sequel to THE HANGOVER filtered through cheap pop psychology. Stale bits about marijuana brownies and masturbation come across as the last refuges of the creatively exhausted. While the film elicits occasional laughs, especially in the uproarious end credits sequence with Stephen Merchant, oftentimes it feels like the jokes are more restrained or halfhearted. That old touch isn’t absent, though. Leave it to the Farrellys to deliver a quality explosive diarrhea joke.

HALL PASS’S premise sounds like something out of a here today, gone tomorrow self-help bestseller making the rounds on morning TV shows. Thankfully it’s treated with about the same seriousness since the running joke is that Maggie and Grace haven’t really risked anything in unleashing their big talking husbands.

The problem is that, like this year’s THE DILEMMA and NO STRINGS ATTACHED, HALL PASS dodges to some degree the issue at the heart of this relationship comedy. Why must these men make such displays of their attraction to other women while in the presence of their wives, and why is the solution to have the couples communicate even less? The film doesn’t need scenes of them meeting with a counselor, but it could stand to have more interaction between husbands and wives, if merely to observe the embarrassment these men are causing.

The main cast is likable, maybe too much so as the boys embark on a week of attempted horndogging that is intended to be their undoing while the girls sit back satisfied in their superiority. Wilson delivers an amiable, low key performance that suggests Rick’s wrongs owe more to thoughtlessness and guilt by association. He seems too decent to find himself in this predicament. For all of Fred’s bluster, Sudeikis isn’t a creep as much as he is trying to live up to society’s image of masculinity. Their inherent harmlessness counteracts with the film’s need to take them down a couple pegs.

As the guys’ legendary womanizing friend Coakley, Richard Jenkins brings the sleaziness that HALL PASS is eager to poke fun at but doesn’t dare invest in the leads. In his very funny pick-up artist role Jenkins reeks of patheticalness like the trendy body spray he’s surely drenched in.

Although it’s refreshing that Fischer and Applegate are appealing and loving wives rather than ballbusters, they’re given so little to do and shoehorned into some dumb subplots that their efforts are squandered.

With HALL PASS the Farrellys strive to cut loose like they first did seventeen years ago, but the film’s slack nature feels like they are growing out of the gross-out humor game. Until a dose of cold reality,Rick and Fred hang onto fantasies better left in the past. The question is if the Farrellys need a similar intervention to realize they should move on from their crude younger days or if they’re better off channeling their comedic energies differently. The middle ground, at least in this instance, doesn’t really suit them.

Grade: C-