Dumb and Dumber To
Dumb and Dumber was a big part of my childhood. I was 12-years-old when the film came out – the perfect age to fully appreciate such a film. I had a Dumb and Dumber t-shirt and spent most of my time trying to figure out how I could get dialogue references into most of my conversations - saying ‘mmmm California’ any time someone mentioned Aspen was a particular favourite of mine. So I came to Dumb and Dumber To (or the wonderfully puntastic Dumm & Dümmehr in Germany [‘Mehr’ being German for ‘more’]) with a lot of worry and a lot of expectation and just a small fear that my love for Dumb and Dumber was mostly maintained through nostalgia. And, of course, I didn’t enjoy the sequel as much as the original.
The film plays out as wonderful fan service for the original. In fact, it intentionally slots in exact replicas of scenes, jokes or set pieces from Dumb and Dumber, from Billy and his bird to similar plot elements, from Jim Carrey’s attempts to make himself sick to his English-accented ‘I like it a lot.’ These aspects of the film don’t feel like cheap tricks, they feel like handshakes from the people that loved and made Dumb and Dumber to the people that loved and watched it. A warm glow came over me when I realized that nothing had changed in Harry & Lloyd’s world and that the film was going to approach that in such a caring way as opposed to the 4th wall breaking techniques you would see in films such as 22 Jump Street.
Dumb and Dumber To has a lot of the same ingredients of comedy that the original had, but it also has some things that either detract or feel completely out of character. It could be a completely personal thing, but one of the things I loved about the original was the road trip aspect of it. Harry & Lloyd were at their best when they were carving up America in their ‘shagging wagon’, complete with a great soundtrack and misadventures along the way. And although the sequel tries to recapture the journey feeling of the original, it just misses out in a lot of key ways. The movement sequences are restrained and shortened and the feeling of the American highway as a key character is gone completely.
There is a problematic (in character consistency terms) scene involving our protagonists observing an academic speech at a conference. They display a sense of cruelty that was never really prevalent in the first film (unless of course they are playing pranks on each other) by shouting at a female presenter to show them ‘her tits’. It’s times like this that made me feel I had lost the characters that I grew up with and I was left with a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the film. The guys only ever make people feel bad because of their stupidity and ignorance – heckling people on stage doesn’t really fit their characters and feels like the caring hand has made way for the cheap tricks I had been worried about.
Of course, the performances from the key figures are spot on and there are even a couple of nice easter eggs in there (pay attention to the new roommate). The funny moments are there and the warmth of the original is there for the most part, but there is just, at times, a difference in atmosphere and pace that detracts from the quality of the film. The sequel is of course supposed to build off of the original, but for some of the time it feels like the film is trying to build without being true to the original creation. I still enjoyed the film, but it mostly made me just want to revisit the original.
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