Wrong and wronger: pointless sequel relentlessly stupid

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/11/2014 (4157 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Remember the blind kid with the bisected bird in the first Dumb and Dumber?

He’s back in this 20-years-later sequel. Now, he has a whole apartment filled with exotic birds, his life’s great pleasure. Unfortunately, he also still shares the same building with chronic dim bulb Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) and Harry’s meth-addicted cat.

This won’t end well.

It makes for a disconcerting beginning when it comes to that, signalling a more heartless direction from the inspired goofs of the previous film.

We find Harry more or less on his own after his chip-toothed buddy Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) has been reduced to a vegetative state following the events of the first movie. (It’s hard to tell, I know.)

It emerges that Lloyd’s two-decade-long catatonia has just been a sustained practical joke on Harry, leading to a gotcha moment that, for both these idiots, is totally worth it.

Reteamed, Harry enlists Lloyd in a plan to save his own life. Harry needs a kidney transplant. And after picking up 20 years worth of mail from his adoptive parents, Harry realizes he apparently fathered a child two decades earlier. The mom, Fraida Felcher, (Kathleen Turner) steers the boys on a journey to find Harry’s biological daughter Penny (Rachel Melvin). For Harry, reuniting mother and daughter is a noble mission that could also save his life. For Lloyd, sexually aroused by a photograph of the winsome Penny, the motivations are somewhat more self-serving.

Directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly keep to the template of the first film by turning this into a road movie in which the guys are once again stalked by a would-be assassin. That would be Travis (Rob Riggle), the lover of Penny’s adoptive mom (Laurie Holden). Both of them have designs on Penny’s family fortune, a plot that sends everybody to the city of El Paso, where the clueless Penny is scheduled to accept an award on behalf of her dad at a TED-like convention/think-tank.

The Farrellys don’t make any bones about the replay aspects of this new movie. The closing credits sequence even shows parallel old-and-new scenes.

The comedy payoffs don’t show in the laboriously constructed set pieces, but in the small throwaway zingers. (Harry, going through his ancient mail, notes: “Oh, I got into Arizona State.”)

But the overall film demonstrates how “new” is not necessarily “better.” The obligatory gross-out gags here include Harry and Lloyd calling on the bereaved parents of a dead friend they knew as “Pee Stain,” or Harry and Lloyd tricked into sexually servicing an old lady in a retirement home. (I can’t believe this gag can be seen on TV commercials in prime time. Is it just me?)

It’s stuff like this that denotes a tonal shift in the comedy towards callousness and cruelty that belies the comparatively benign comedy of the first movie. Guys, it’s Dumb and Dumber, not Mean and Meaner.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca