TORONTO — Jeff Daniels and Canada’s Jim Carrey are back together in Dumb and Dumber To (yes, it’s an intentional misspelling) almost two decades after the original movie introduced the world to Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas.
Also back for the sequel are co-directors Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly.
Will fans of the original want to revisit the silliness? Will a new generation of movie-goers want to check it out? Here’s what some of the critics are saying.
“There’s absolutely no need for this belated sequel, other than the fact that costar Jim Carrey and writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly could use the career lift,” wrote Ty Burr in the Boston Globe.
“But everyone has piled into this dumber, sillier, more consistently funny reprise with an enthusiasm that’s infectious, and not in a low-grade medical way.”
Burr concluded it’s a movie “to make you groan and smile in equal guilty measure.”
At TIME, Richard Corliss said he simply wanted to laugh but “Dumb and Dumber To rarely coaxed me to that state of obscene bliss.”
“I wish I could put as little thought into writing about Dumb and Dumber To as the Farrelly brothers did in making it,” he said.
“This movie breaks not only the canons of etiquette but of how to make people laugh. The usual methods are wit and surprise; the brothers go for aimless, charmless shock. That may make them subversive of a high order. Or possibly filmmakers who, 20 years on, have run out of funny.”
Toronto Star reviewer Peter Howell, though, found plenty of funny.
” I laughed a lot at this movie, possibly even more than I did at the original film, which I enjoyed quite a bit,” admitted Howell.
“Dumb and Dumber To is that rare long-delayed sequel that hasn’t suffered from a weight of unrealized expectations, probably because the bar is always low on comedies like this.”
READ MORE: See what the critics are saying about other recent movies
In Forbes, Scott Mendelson complained that most of the jokes fall flat and Harry and Lloyd are “now not just dimwitted but also outright mean and bullying.”
He wrote: “The charm of the original, to the extent that the original was an enjoyable character farce that led to better things for all participants, is long gone. This is not the Dumb and Dumber sequel we needed, but it’s the one we deserved for inexplicably clamoring for a second installment in the first place.”
Mendelson called the sequel “mostly a comic misfire” and “clearly beneath the talent of all involved.”
John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter agreed, calling Dumb and Dumber To “a mostly mirthless outing.”
DeFore admitted there were funny moments but not enough to compensate “for overall staleness.”
“When the gags a movie is most confident in — the ones it uses three or four times, as if they were sure things — involve pushing unsuspecting pedestrians into a bush or riffing on ‘Bond, James Bond,’ something’s wrong in the yuk factory.”
New York Daily News critic Joe Neumaier said while Carrey and Daniels are back, “the laughs aren’t.”
Neumaier wrote: “The Farrellys, in revisiting their first success, think more is more. In fact there’s less: less jokes, less heart and less of the quirky weirdness that is Carrey’s home turf.
“It lets idiot movies down, too, and that’s a hard trick to pull off. From junky production values to the parade of unfunny supporting characters to its lazy energy, Dumb and Dumber To falls on its face.”
Comments