The Dead Pool (1988)

Director: Buddy Van Horn

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Jim Carrey

Have I Seen it Before: Never. And now I’ve seen all of the Dirty Harry films.

Did I Like It: I’d been looking so forward to this one, given the absolutely bananas cast on display, all before they became anything that would be featured above the title. Carrey is here before Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) made him a permanent light in the firmament, and even before Neeson because “that one guy in cool films who isn’t Bruce Campbell” in Darkman (1990). I honestly don’t think I’ve managed to overhype myself on a movie this much since The Flash (2023).

I was really wanting it to be bananas, all the while knowing that I was setting myself up for a goodly amount of disappointment. It never even occurred to me that Carrey is only here in the role of the guy that they find dead in the first few minutes of a Law & Order episode.

There’s probably a reason that both Neeson and Carrey had to wait for another couple of years before they could be considered stars, and it is probably the same reason that Eastwood swore off the prospect of another entry in the series*. This is not the triumphant conclusion one might think of. It’s not oddly funny like The Enforcer (1976), but it might be unreasonable to expect a part five of a series to reach up to the heights of previous entries. The real damning thing here is that Harry may simply not be the hero that the 80s need. Gone are the days where most Americans felt lost amidst a world that was growing too fast for them, and seemed like it had gone completely insane. That’s where Harry thrived: being grumpy but strangely fair among people he would never understand. Now he just seems grumpy.

*He could have gotten away with—and probably be forgiven for—making the main character of Gran Torino (2008) the Unforgiven (1992) for Callahan.

The Truman Show (1998)

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, yes. The summer of 1998 was one of those summers where I diligently saw everything on tap. I remember so clearly going to see this one with some friends. I arrived on time, but later than everyone else. While they grabbed seats, I grabbed popcorn for myself. When I returned, the movie had started. I couldn’t find my friends, and eventually had to give up and find a seat. It took a solid five minute to realize I had wandered into the wrong theater, which was currently about an hour into running the film. So, that first day I saw the scene where Truman (Carrey) is reunited with his father (Brian Delate) twice.

Did I Like It: And the film worked pretty well in both contexts then, and it ages insanely well today. It’s nearly impossible to peg this as a 90s film, and indeed could have been produced (with maybe some slightly tweaked special effects in just a few spots) ten years early or ten years later. It may be the most ageless summer comedy ever produced.

It’s the perfect vehicle for a Carrey looking to diversify his image from the broadest possible comedies and Batman villains*. Allowing Carrey to occasionally indulge in his instincts, but ultimately needing a fully-fleshed out performance to deliver a real story, it’s the perfect stepping stone between The Cable Guy (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999)**.

Ultimately, though, it is that thing that was rare enough in its day and is almost unheard of today: a big Hollywood movie with some ideas. I remember that day after my friends and I had seen it the first time (while I saw it 1.25 times). On the way home we talked about free will, and the inclination of powers greater than us to thwart the exercise of free will. It was heady talk for a smattering of 14-year-olds. I can reassure you we didn’t have anything like the same conversation on our way out of Armageddon (1998).

*Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things. I happen to like both of those things a great deal.

**Again, two things I happen to enjoy a great deal.

The Majestic (2001)

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. There was something always romantic about throwing away everything that had been holding you down before and just running the neighborhood movie theater for the rest of your days (I know… I know…) but like with most people, the movie sort of disappeared from my mind.

Did I Like It: This movie exists in a weird nether-region. It is unashamedly patriotic, and one would think it lucked out and came out at a brief, relatively impossible to predict moment where the national mood was similarly patriotic, but somehow it landed with an absolutely thud. Darabont’s other films didn’t exactly do gangbusters at the box office, but found their audiences later on after repeated airings on cable. TNT didn’t want anything to do with this film?

It’s a barely remembered footnote in Darabont’s career*, especially coming off of two of the more transcendent Stephen King adaptations in the canon, but it has that same trait that made those two earlier films such a success. It’s unabashedly the kind of movie that Frank Capra would make, if he were still making films in the 1990s or 2000s.

And still, America wants nothing to do with the film, TNT wants nothing to do with the film, and even I kind of lost track of the thing over the years. Why? Maybe some people were turned off by dramatic turn from Carrey that doesn’t default to his normal antics (even The Truman Show (1998), probably his best performance, has him occasionally tapping into the energies which made him a star in the first place), but I certainly wasn’t. I think it might be more to do with the fact that for all of its charms, it has none of the transcendent moments that made The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) the classics they were.

It’s just a nice little movie, and when you judge those by comparison, there’s always a bit lacking.

*By the way: Why doesn’t he get to work anymore? He gets booted from after making in my mind the only watchable episodes of The Walking Dead, Mob City doesn’t capture the imagination, and then he’s gone forever? The man made Shawshank and we just have no use for him? Now that I type that, I wonder if there is some larger problem keeping his work from us. Maybe I don’t want to know.

The Mask (1994)

Director: Chuck Russell

Cast: Jim Carrey, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene, Cameron Diaz

Have I Seen It Before: You don’t have your tenth birthday in 1994 and somehow avoid the film. This is going to seem like a strange idea, but it was only after re-watching it recently that it dawned on me just how much I must have watched this one back in the day. Individual moments--even including slight instances of behavior—tweaked a memory.

Did I Like It: And yet it’s been years, probably even decades since the last time I watched the film. Why? I think I made the decision at some point that of all of Carrey’s films in the first decade or so of his bona fide movie stardom, it wasn’t nearly as funny (even in an adolescent way) as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)*, or Dumb and Dumber (1995).

But there’s more to the film than that, at least nominally, as the last half hour of the film is so standard I think I suddenly remembered why I got to a point where I found the film underwhelming. If you can get over the fact that CGI ages  worse than new-off-the-lot cars, there’s an impressively credible quality of a cartoon come to life in Carrey’s performance, made all the more impressive by the handful of shots where he had to stop moving around for the pyrotechnics around him to work properly. All of the highlights of his career, especially the early years, might make one think that he was going through prolonged manic episodes barely captured by film, but it’s hard to ignore here that Carrey is a more finely-tuned machine than he generally gets credit.

I was also oddly charmed by the plot of the movie of all things. It might be an obvious change to have the spunky reporter (Amy Yasbeck) be the morally bankrupt betrayer, and the vamp (Diaz) has the heart of gold. On the topic of Diaz, Carrey might have to take a bit of a backseat to his leading lady, as she enters filmdom here with more charisma (and I do mean charisma) than reels of ogling could ever hope to obscure. There were probably any number of attractive actresses who could have been cast in the role, but few would have been able to make a career out of it.

*And I’m not sure anyone—regardless of what they feel about the modern world—can watch Ace Ventura and not feel a little weirdly nauseous about the whole prospect.

Man on the Moon (1999)

Director: Miloš Morman

Cast: Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, my. This, along with Three Kings (1999), My Dog Skip (1999) (my sister was and is crazy for anything with dogs in it), and, naturally, Batman (1989) were the first four DVDs I ever owned. It seems like a long time ago, but also at times feels like it was just yesterday.

Did I Like It: Those first few dozen times I watched the film, I couldn’t help but become a little obsessed with Kaufman (Carrey). Not quite to the degree that Carrey became obsessed. Who could? It is a fairly apt primer into the ethos Kaufman strove for in his all-too-brief career. If you are getting ready to watch the film for the first time, it will bother you, it will annoy you, and it will occasionally be very funny. At no time will there be a moment where any of this is done by accident. At it’s very best, and if you’re with Kaufman in what he was trying to do, you’ll start to re-think what entertainment can actually be.

And yet, a movie hits differently after you have not seen it in quite a while, but saw so many times at a particular time in your life. The flaws creep up. I now realize that there was no way Kaufman was playing Ms. Pac-Man when George Shapiro (DeVito) tells him that he closed the deal to get him to star in Taxi. That show premiered in 1978, and didn’t start popping up in arcades until 1982. That’s a nitpicky thing, and the kind of thing I only pick up on in movies after I went past the age of 16, but now that we’re on the topic of DeVito, Taxi, and George Shapiro: the movie does go to great lengths to re-create scenes of that show, but has to bend over backwards to be a world that includes George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman, and Taxi, but doesn’t also include Danny DeVito or Louie De Palma.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)

Director: Jeff Fowler

Cast: James Marsden, Ben Schwartz, Tika Sumpter, Jim Carrey

Have I Seen it Before: No. I even took it upon myself to re-watch the original film. Isn’t it wild that we now have entire film franchises which have existed only in the time of COVID?

Did I Like It: I probably already covered most of this in my review of the first film, but: I think the mythos surrounding Sega’s mascot was always, and will continue to always be a complete and utter bore. The game was a faster Super Mario Bros., which certainly has its place, and reaching for those Chaos Emeralds adds a fun challenge layer to the game. But Knuckles? G.U.N.? Don’t even get me started on Shadow the Hedgehog, which has to be the dullest extension of a video game since the right Pong paddle.

The first film shakes most of that loose in favor of an admittedly wobbly human-best-friend story, but it was all serviceable, and to see Jim Carrey reach back for his inner-Riddler from <Batman Forever (1995)> was a delightful treat, made all the more heartening by the through that it might inspire the youth of today to go seek out the Bat-films of yesteryear.

This film only has Carrey continuing that schtick. Sonic’s best human pal (Marsden) is here, but his storyline is so perfunctory that what scant logic we have here would not have been impacted if both he and Sumpter were completely excised from the film.

Where does the film find the material to fill out the rest of the film while working with those defciencies? In Emeralds, and Knuckles (Idris Elba, who I hoped paid off a mortgage here), and Tales (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Shadow. I didn’t go into this film expecting much, but somehow it delivered everything I didn’t want.

Weird that a film would make me long for the restrained wonder that is Batman Forever, but here we are.

Sonic The Hedgehog (2020)

Director: Jeff Fowler

Cast: Ben Schwarz, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Jim Carrey

Have I Seen it Before: Sigh. No. I’ve been resisting seeing it because I ultimately wasn’t aching to see a live-action Sonic movie (more on that later) and it felt like the time might come again fairly quickly wherein I could go catch it in a quick matinee. I eventually caved and watched it on demand.

Did I Like It: You know, kind of?

I’m a longtime player of the video games (or at least some of them), I can probably walk the Green Hill Zone, Act 1 in my sleep and get over 200 rings for my troubles. So, I’m not coming to the series blind, but I’ve never seen the point of any of the extended mythology surrounding the characters. The moment Knuckles the Enchida (which is a thing) arrives, there are far too many characters circling the series that are essentially repainted versions of the original blue streak*.

Thankfully, the movie eschews almost everything found in the nearly thirty years of history with the games. Aside from a cameo by Tails in a mid-credits scene and a brief prologue featuring one of the Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010) (I think, honestly the opening is pretty weird) there is little mythology in sight, in favor of an agreeable abusing buddy road picture. The Chaos Emeralds are nowhere in sight, and some fans may blanche at that, but I maintain that we’re all better off. 

Ben Schwarz is always a welcome presence, and it’s nice seeing Jim Carrey return to the kind of schtick that made him famous. We probably don’t need two or three rubber-faced tirades a year, but a visit once in a while from a character not terribly removed from the 

Sonic as a creature doesn’t fully work, but one can imagine a large part of that is because of the film’s famed delays in production after we all collectively cringed at the unholy furry thing that greeted us in the trailer. Honestly, I think people would have gotten used to the new version of Sonic if he had been brought to full gestation, but we have what we have, and the fans are not rioting. That’s fine.

*Yes. I know Tails, Knuckles and the rest (the names of said characters escape me at the moment) all have slightly different approaches to and abilities in both the 2d and 3d worlds of the games, and no, I’m not terribly interested in discussing them. That’s kind of the point.

Batman Forever (1995)

Director: Joel Schumacher

Cast: Val Kilmer, Chris O’Donnell, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman

Have I Seen It Before?: Ah, 1995. It was a simpler time. Apparently. There I am, ten going on forty-seven, a Riddler (Carrey) action figure in one hand, the novelization of the movie in another. Somewhere in the distance, “Kiss From a Rose” is playing on every radio station in the known universe. I had the above poster hanging in my room well into the twenty-first century.

Yeah, I saw it.

Did I like it?: In a word, no.

A weird and idiosyncratic blockbuster (or as weird and idiosyncratic as a film is like to get when a board of directors is at all involved in the creative process) is unleashed into theaters. Some fans balk. Others think it is a work of genius. Toys don’t sell as well, which is the real problem. Another director is pulled into right the ship. Who cares if the movie is any good, as long as it doesn’t piss off anybody?

Now, am I speaking of the state of play of the Star Wars saga at this very moment, or the circumstances surrounding the Dark Knight twenty-five years ago?

The differences between the two situations are cosmetic, at best, aside from the reality that Star Wars – Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017) is nowhere near the weird, intentionally ugly film* that became Batman Returns (1992). And so we are stuck with both Star Wars – Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Batman Forever. Both are less films than they are studio memos with a runtime. Both were mangled mercilessly in the editing room. Both are (probably) going to make a ton of money, and the studio that birthed the film will not learn a damned thing.

The campiness isn’t even the problem. Both the tv series and the feature film Batman (1966) revel in their campiness and are infinitely rewatchable delights. 

No character has any real arc to speak of, aside from maybe Dick Grayson (O’Donnell) who wants to kill Two-Face (Jones, inexplicably pigeon-holed into a c-minus Jack Nicholson impression that would be embarrassing to anything beyond single-celled organisms) but then decides he won’t. One would think that this would please Batman (Kilmer, forever cementing the fact that Michael Keaton is an American treasure), who has spent the entirety of the film’s runtime discouraging his nascent protégé against the evils of vengeance for the sake of vengeance. Instead, Batman immediately kills Two-Face himself. Also, the Riddler and a blonde lady are there. Fade Out. Roll Credits. Cue Seal.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie. 

*A sincere compliment, I assure you.

The Cable Guy (1996)

Director: Ben Stiller

Cast: Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann, Jack Black

Have I Seen it Before: It’s one of my favorites. Fight me.

Did I Like It: Don’t make me say it again.

The text of this review appeared previously in a blog post entitled “How Could No One Else Like These Movies?” published 04/23/2017.

Remembered mainly for Jim Carrey’s then-record twenty-million dollar paycheck, Ben Stiller’s second venture in the director’s chair was almost immediately dismissed upon release as “too dark,” “bleak,” and “not containing nearly enough scenes of an adult male attempting ventriloquism via his buttocks.” For my money, though it is not only a great film, it is the best film that writer Judd Apatow, director Stiller and star Carrey has yet to make. 

Yes, it is the pitch-black tale of a cable installer gone rogue who injects himself into a hapless customer’s life, a la The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). It’s more thriller-esque elements are tempered by an all-consuming sympathy for both of its main characters. Both Steven (Matthew Broderick) and the alias-laden titular Cable Guy (Carrey) are woefully unable to relate to people outside of television*. Broderick’s character has the capacity to change and be better by the end of the movie, whereas Carrey is a far more broken, far more tragic character. We, the pop culture obsessed inevitably fall on a spectrum somewhere between the two leads, and we can only hope that our lives are a little more Broderick and a little less Carrey.

Also, it has one of the greater homages to “Amok Time” ever produced—what’s not to love? Seriously, go give the film another look, and if you still hold as low an opinion of the movie as you did twenty years ago… Well, then, just keep it to yourself. I really like it.

But we can all agree it’s better than Zoolander 2 (2016), right?

*Remind us of anyone?