He Doesn’t Do Humans

The early films of Jim Carrey are interesting. The comedian came up on In Living Color and was one of the breakout stars from that sketch comedy series. When he made the move back movies (he’d co-starred in various films earlier in his career, with roles in films like Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy), it was clear that studios really wanted that specific side of Jim Carrey for roles. The hyper-animated, living cartoon version of Carrey that he brought out on In Living Color. While he could play more dramatic roles, that wasn’t what made him a star on the show.

As such, his early, big films featured him mugging, acting looney, and improvising like hell to get any laugh he could. It’s the schtick that worked on the show, and it was the schtick people wanted in his films, too. Thus, his early works feature what can only be described as a cacophony of humor as Carrey threw everything at the wall in hopes that something stuck. And a lot did. Going back and watching some of his breakout films, it’s pretty clear that there was something special to this performance style from Carrey. It’s a lot, and it does grate on the nerves once you’ve watched enough of these films… but one at a time, and for single doses, Carrey was really damn funny.

Which is why it’s a pity that one of his most famous films, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, takes a hard turn in its last act that absolutely ruins the movie. It’s rare I find a film that I’m enjoying so thoroughly, finding it fun and funny and wanting more even as I recognize what I’m watching is so stupid, only to then have the film add in a sequence that ruins the film so hard I feel uncomfortable going back and ever watching it again. I hadn’t actually watched this first Ace Ventura movie since I was young, but even then I recognized that the final act of the movie totally botches things in the worst, most uncomfortable, even hateful way possible, and it’s taken me literal decades to even go back just to see if what I remembers being there was really that bad.

And yes. It’s that bad. In fact, I’d argue it’s so much worse than I remembered.

In the film, Carrey plays the titular Ventura, a detective specializing only in animals. He feels a connection to them that he doesn’t feel for humans, so he takes only animal related cases, full stop. His specialty is why he’s called in by the Miami Dolphins after their team mascot, Snowflake, is stolen from his tank. The cops have some clues, but the squad, led by Lt. Lois Einhorn (Sean Young) and Sgt. Aguado (John Capodice), seems to be going in the wrong direction. Ace is recommended to team manager Roger Podacter (Troy Evans) and publicist Melissa Robinson (Courteney Cox) to help get the case back on track.

Although strange in his behavior (very strange indeed, to the point that nearly everyone around him thinks he’s a nutter), Ace has a good sense for solving mysteries and almost immediately finds a clue that could turn the whole case on its head: a single, yellow, tri-cut stone that could have only come from a 1984 AFC Championship ring that was lost in the dolphin enclosure water filter. That means whoever took it had to have been on the 1984 Miami Dolphins team. Now Ace just has to figure out who, and why they’d hate that mascot, or maybe the whole team, so much…

To be clear, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a very silly movie in its first two acts. Watching it, you get the feeling that Carrey looked at the script and threw most of it out on set so he could do what he wanted. This is more or less confirmed by interviews where he stated he not only helped rewrite the script (which had already been rewritten before he even came on as Ace) but then improvised wildly on set. He wanted to be as big, as over-the-top, as ludicrous as possible, so that everything he did could get a laugh.

It’s a go-for-broke attitude I do appreciate as, no doubt, Carrey throws himself wildly into every scene he’s in (and he’s basically in all of them). It’s a performance that could have made or broken his career, as per Carrey, and lucky for him it worked. Carrey absolutely runs away with the film, milking laughs out of just about everything he does. Some of it is stupid, some horribly juvenile, and often you’re laughing at things that would be stupid if someone else did the same joke, all because Carrey’s performance is tuned to just make it work.

Honestly, everyone else in the film is acting in a different movie, which is part of why it works. This is basically a straight-laced detective film (about animals instead of humans, of course) with one strange man transplanted in from a different universe. It doesn’t matter who he’s acting opposite of – Sean Young, Courteney Cox, Udo Kier, Dan Marino – they aren’t important. They don’t get laughs. Hell, they barely act at all, functioning as set dressing so Carrey can do his thing and bounce off other people. Big stars (or people that would be big stars) are in this, but it’s practically a one-man show at the end of it all. And, for two acts, it’s impressive.

Unfortunately, then the film takes a hard turn in the last act and ruins it all. The case is predicated on the idea that one of the players at the Super Bowl in 1984, a man named Ray Finkle, screwed the pooch on what could have been the game-winning kick, and ultimately lost the game for the Dolphins. After that he went off the deep end, blaming Marino for the bad kick, blaming the team managers for firing him, blaming the Dolphins for everything. So he sets up a plan to ruin them all, which on its own is fine motivation. A revenge story works in most mysteries.

Where the film takes the dive is when it reveals that Ray Finkle is also Lois Einhorn or, as Ace puts it, “she’s a man!” It’s very transphobic, and while you can say, “oh well, it was 1994 and they just didn’t know,” even back then people were saying, “this is a pretty awful thing to do.” Ace realizes that Lois is Ray, and then he has the most over-the-top disgusted reaction to it. Carrey defends this as saying, “I wanted his reaction to be so over the top that no one would believe it,” but that’s not really how it plays in the movie. And even if that’s how he thought his character worked, the film has everyone else have the same reaction when they realize as well.

Plus, Ace strips Lois down to their undergarments, and then shows her tucked-bad genitals to everyone, outing them in the most graphic and awful way possible. Even if you thought Ace was reacting poorly before, there’s absolutely no way you can view this and not think, “that’s pretty shitty.” I thought it back in 1994 when I was 13 years old and this movie was still new. I think it’s even worse now, with time and society (largely) moving forward. This kind of trans panic humor shouldn’t have any place in film, then or now, and being the big reveal of the last act of the film, it ruins everything that came before.

And the worst part is that Ace is a character kids looked up to back then. Not only did this film get a sequel (which, thankfully, isn’t nearly as problematic, at least not in a homophobic or transphobic sense, anyway) but he also had a cartoon as well pitched directly at children. They’d see that, want to see the film, and then walk away with that thought that “trans people are detestable”. No matter the intent from Carrey, that’s the message the film sends and it’s simply awful.

So yeah, I simply cannot stand this movie. It has two really solid acts but that doesn’t excuse how gross and hateful the last act becomes. Even after two rewrites, the fact that this late-game reveal was kept in the movie is absolutely baffling. Sure, the 1990s were a different time, but this clearly illustrates that “different” absolutely does not mean “better”.