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Twenty years ago, a couple of bumbling idiots set out on a cross-country road trip and kicked off the careers of wacky comic directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly. Since then, the Farrelly Brothers have definitely had their highs and lows—though, most recently, a whole lot of lows. So they’ve decided to reunite with their old friends, Harry and Lloyd, for Dumb and Dumber To.
Dumb and Dumber To catches up with Jeff Daniels’s Harry and Jim Carrey’s Lloyd 20 years after their first comic adventure. When Harry reveals that he’s in need of a kidney transplant, he and Lloyd set out to find a donor—and their search leads them to discover that Harry is the father of a young woman who was given up for adoption more than two decades ago.
Determined to track down Harry’s daughter and ask for her kidney, the two find themselves on yet another cross-country road trip—this time to El Paso, where she’s about to give an important speech at an engineering conference.
Devoted fans of the original Dumb and Dumber will most likely be relieved to find that Harry and Lloyd are every bit as dimwitted and immature today as they were 20 years ago. Somehow, they’ve managed to survive the last two decades without growing up or getting any smarter or dying nasty but totally avoidable deaths (though, admittedly, Lloyd’s survival probably has a lot to do with the fact that he’s been living in a psychiatric hospital, pretending to be catatonic). And their jokes still revolve around various bodily functions and their own bumbling idiocy.
Unfortunately, though, that’s also a part of the film’s problem: there’s simply nothing new here. The gags are the same. The characters are the same, too; they’re just 20 years older, which makes their stupidity a little less funny and a little more pathetic. Carrey, too, is just as outrageously over-the-top as before, overplaying every goofy facial expression and overacting every ridiculous line. And the fact that he’s 20 years older makes the character more annoying—and his obsession with his best friend’s daughter just plain creepy.
Daniels’s Harry, meanwhile, fares just a bit better. He may not be much smarter, but at least he seems slightly more high-functioning, his stupidity leaning more toward lovably blundering than painfully irritating. But, alas, that isn’t enough to make the sequel even the slightest bit necessary.
If you absolutely loved Dumb and Dumber—and you still have the sense of humor of a 13-year-old boy—you’ll most likely enjoy catching up with the comic duo in the long-awaited sequel. But while it may be good for a chuckle or two, the same old characters and the same old gags make it a stale, reheated comedy.
Blu-ray Review:
If you just can’t help but love Harry and Lloyd’s bumbling wackiness, you won’t want to miss the special features included on the Dumb and Dumber To Blu-ray. Though the alternate opening and eight deleted/extended scenes don’t offer many hilarious new gags, the other features could be worth checking out. If you love Jim Carrey’s over-the-top shtick, you’ll love the gag reel, which features some on-set silliness, a whole lot of Carrey’s funny faces, and poor Jeff Daniels attempting to remind everyone that he recently won an Emmy. And if you feel that you need to justify your love of the Dumb and Dumber movies, you’ll want to check out What’s So Smart About Dumb and Dumber To, which discusses the appeal—and the possible health benefits—of dumb comedies.
But perhaps the most interesting feature is “That’s Awesome” – The Story of Dumb and Dumber To, a surprisingly lengthy, five-part feature that discusses the entire process of bringing this long-awaited sequel to theaters. It covers everything from writing to casting to cameos to editing, with man-on-the-street interviews mixed in to add some nostalgia to the mix.
Of course, while the Blu-ray’s special features do try to lean on fans’ sense of nostalgia for the original Dumb and Dumber, they still offer more of the same humor as the sequel. So if the movie didn’t exactly leave you in stitches, most of the features will fall flat, too. But if you laughed your way through the movie, you’ll want to take some time to explore the extras, too.
Listen to the review on Shelf Discovery:
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