Critics reviews

Abstracted, purified, everything in service of the gag and the malapropism, old friends in fresh air: the way almost everyone ignored this movie is, if anything, a sign of its importance. When so many reviewers trip over themselves to proclaim how moving, witty, "surprisingly good" some junk like Guardians of the Galaxy is (BOOM! there's my first Armondism), what hope is there for a fundamentally smart movie about fundamental idiocy?

There's something ineffably beautiful about this movie... Perhaps its biggest coup is the way in which the gags play as if they're only meant to funny within the world of the film. The jokes are purposefully (charmingly!) awful, often rejecting even a tacit connection to a potential audience

I haven't seen D&D in 20 years, but I think the sequel does measure up. Like the first film, it's wilfully stupid but it has a certain something, its elusive quality amplified by the fact that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels (as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne) are now in their 50s, as are co-directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly.

The opening scenes play awkwardly and off tempo, as if Daniels and Carrey were pausing for laughter in between each line. There's also a regrettable "funny Chinese accent" sequence that would have been offensive even in the original. But the Farrelly's sacred space is the road trip, and once the two idiots fire up their hearse's engine the movie finds its slapstick sweet spot.

You know that Carrey and the Farrellys can do better, because in parts of the first movie and throughout Me, Myself, & Irene, they did. This movie is determined to wear down your resistance, but it's wearying. Having Daniels and two Latin actors playing gardeners yank a catheter out of Carrey might be in the spirit of the original movie, but it's also an imitation of it.

As Lloyd says after very nearly being clipped by a bus, "comedy is all about timing," and To has the stuff. (The fatal-blindside-by-speeding-vehicle joke comes back later, and it slays.) It lacks the blithe, jaunty momentum of its predecessor, and it doesn't produce nearly so many screengrab-ready images, but the comedy for the most part has the feeling of growing organically from character and situations, and you rarely get a sense of having taken a costly detour to arrive at a rimshot.

...As for the brilliant physical mechanisms of the Farrellys' gags, they remain undiminished: there are three, in "Dumb and Dumber To," that happen so fast and are so delightful that I wanted the projectionist to rewind the digital files immediately and show them again. Alas, there were just three. They last a few second each. The movie runs a hundred and ten minutes.

The Farrellys are still not much interested in film as a visual medium, and when Lloyd and Harry aren't smacking each other or dropping their pants, you might as well be listening to a radio play. There's a story, but it doesn't matter, certainly not to the leads or the good-natured sidekicks like Kathleen Turner and Rob Riggle.

Like most incredibly tardy sequels that function more as reunions than as continuations, Dumb and Dumber To never shies away from recycling itself, which is only a shame in that some of its best moments show how much the Farrelly brothers have evolved as filmmakers and as fartmakers, whereas each self-satisfied "ah lock it a lawh" callback slams the increasingly uneven proceedings back into the comedic equivalent of the fetal position.