ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE. Directed by Tom Shadyac; written by Jack Bernstein, Tom Shadyac and Jim Carrey; produced by James G. Robinson for Morgan Creek. Starring Jim Carrey. Rated PG-13.
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Ace Ventura has about the same ratio of laughs to gross-outs, on-target punchlines to lapses of timing and/or taste, that Fox's "In Living Color" does. Since Carrey is the star of one and a highlight of the other, that's not too surprising. It's also useful. You can have a pretty good idea going in of whether you'll be able to stomach his big-screen antics.
For my money, that ratio just isn't high enough. I don't mind tasteless jokes, per se, but they do have to be funny. Not enough of them are in Ace Ventura.
The movie's "story," if it can be called that, is pretty lame, too. (Again, that by itself isn't enough to ruin a movie, if it's well played-out—not the case here.)
Ace (Carrey) lives hand-to-mouth as a finder of lost pets. He truly loves his work, and has a rapport with his animal clients that both makes his job easier and provides some of the movie's best laughs. What could be more natural, then, than to call on this professional when the Miami Dolphins' mascot cetacean is kidnapped, just before the Super Bowl?
Naturally, Ace succeeds where the police and everyone else has failed, and uncovers the very strange and not very entertaining plot behind the dolphin-napping. It involves transvestism and revenge, eventually even a murder, and it just doesn't work at all.
The supporting cast doesn't work much, either, but with Carrey's style of humor, they don't really have to. He doesn't need much feedback to function, not even when he's having sex with girlfriend Melissa (Courteney Cox).
Carrey's mugging makes the messy plot worth watching, at least part of the time, because he is a quite talented physical comedian who will go to any lengths for a laugh.
That, however, is precisely the main problem with Ace Ventura. Carrey just doesn't know when to quit. Some laughs, after all, just aren't worth pursuing.
February 23, 1994