Yahoo Movies Mean and Meaner: A Roundup of 'Dumb and Dumber To' Reviews
When Dumb and Dumber was released in 1994, it was groundbreaking. Now, 20 years later, its sequel is getting trashed for covering the same old territory.
Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels return as Lloyd and Harry in brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber To, bringing back the bowl cut and frizz in a new and remarkably stupid adventure. Lloyd has been pretending to be in a catatonic state for the last 20 years, faking devastation over the loss of Mary “Samsonite” (he evidently didn’t pursue his slim chance with her), and when he decides to reveal his stunt, the moronic duo set off on a quest to find Harry’s long-lost daughter.
Their initial trip to Aspen never pleased a huge number of critics 20 years ago — the film, a mega-hit at the box office, has a 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. That, however, dwarfs the score given to the new flick thus far, which sits at a meager 28%.
Perhaps the most scathing review comes from the AP’s Lindsay Bahr, who says that this sequel is “so uninspired that it could retroactively tarnish our affection for the original.” We have changed as a culture, Bahr argues, and so “what may have been subversive and irreverent in 1994, now just seems vulgar, hateful and tone-deaf — from their unabashedly misogynistic treatment of women to their insidious racism.”
Related: Spoilerific: Watch the Awesome, Top-Secret Cameo in ‘Dumb and Dumber To’
Star Ledger critic Stephen Witty largely agreed with Bahr, lamenting that while comedy legends such as Monty Python “deliberately, queasily broke taboos to make us see society’s real ugliness” and that “their bad taste came, ironically, from good taste,” the crudeness of Dumb and Dumber To comes “just comes from grossness.”
The same complaint comes from Toronto Globe and Mail critic Liam Lacey, who finds that the past two decades find the Farrellys (and their four co-writers) nastier: ”There’s a new meanness in Dumb and Dumber To – nasty jokes about elderly Asians’ accents, insults about Kathleen Turner’s weight and a scene where Harry and Lloyd yell sexist taunts at a female lecturer – which is unpleasant, a kind of postmillennial snark that’s a bad fit.”
To be fair, not everyone hated the movie. Tom Long, writing for the Detroit News, for example, appreciated Dumb and Dumber To precisely because it did not stray too far from the original.
“The approach is familiar — joke after joke after joke, relentlessly — while both Carrey and Daniels are so freaking on that there’s no stopping the momentum,” he writes. “And thank heavens. In a world of ISIS, Ebola, dwindling retirement funds and severe drought, somehow this film seems needed.”
So, hey, that’s something.
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