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Bad from all angles

Arizona Summer Wildcat

Latest Farrelly brother film a boring attempt at romantic

When the Farrelly brothers emerged in 1994 with "Dumb and Dumber," it seemed that a terrific new comedy team had broken into Hollywood.

This was a movie that used potty humor and mucus and other bodily functions - but it didn't exactly sink to the level that those sort of jokes usually called for. Even though the movie was about two extremely stupid, child-like men, the film looked at them in a relatively adult way. The plot was silly, but the characters developed into real humans with real emotions and that endeared them to the audience.

Flash forward six years and see what the Farrellys have become. Because many of the critics latched onto the gross-out humor found in "Dumb and Dumber," and pegged them as pushing the limits of decency, the Farrellys have zeroed in on that and have lost all the humanness that made those jokes funny.

"Me, Myself and Irene," is a film about being schizophrenic. It's also supposed to be a love story and a getaway chase and a fight against police corruption. But it's actually just one extremely tedious joke about the mentally unstable.

The Farrellys no longer care about building stories out of their "outlandish" concepts. Instead they work a plot out of all of the nasty jokes they can think up. But they simply try way too hard.

Take the first 10 minutes, for example. The audience learns that Charlie (Jim Carrey) is a nice policeman who is madly in love with his new wife. Their limo driver, a black midget, gets into a fight with Charlie on the way home from their wedding. His new wife apologizes to the driver and discovers that he is a MENSA president with a doctorate doing a sociological study by driving a limousine.

They smile at each other and low and behold when Charlie's children are born they arrive black themselves. It's kind of funny.

Then the audience sees Charlie's wife leaving him for the MENSA man, getting into a convertible and kissing him. Not really funny since the joke is simply on the midget now. Then to make things more "Farrelly disgusting," woman and man stick their tongues out and lap at each other for a few seconds.

It's not funny. It's just gross - and the Farrellys have ruined the joke by playing it way too far.

There are so many pointless "jokes" in the film, which exist solely to get an "eww" out of the people in the audience. And the worst part is that no characters are developed in the midst of the grossness.

In "There's Something About Mary," the Farrellys created at least five pretty memorable scenes, disgust wise. But they were all tied into Ben Stiller and his sincere love for "Mary" Cameron Diaz. If one didn't enjoy the humor in itself, they could see past it to the human being involved and laugh with or at him within the situation since he was a real character sharing real human characteristics.

But with "Me, Myself and Irene," neither one of the lead characters have any depth to them - including Carrey, playing two characters locked in one body. Even when a scene seems to be taking a path that would lead to some real emotion within the story, the Farrellys destroy it by adding something crude. They may think that it adds humor while moving the plot along, but in truth their disgusting material destroys any sense of reality found in the film.

The Farrellys need to realize that although people do enjoy watching potty humor and seeing midgets fight tall people ("Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" ) these things have to be based in some sort of humanity. People find humor in things they can relate to, like Ben Stiller's sweetness in "Mary" and Carrey's naivetˇ in "Dumber."

Without that, their characters would simply be stereotypes - a pathetic freak and an idiot no one would talk to - the two stereotypes in fact seen in "Me, Myself and Irene."