Way back when I was at University and living life full of drunken nights and study all day this comedy starring Jim Carrey was released, it was 1994. As a small group we went to see this at the cinema and come out laughing. A year or so later I brought the video cassette of ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ and I never looked back Produced by James G. Robinson, with the screenplay credits going to Jack Bernstein, Tom Shadyac and Jim Carrey, but the original story was all down to Canadian Jack Bernstein. Directed by Tom Shadyac the movie starred Jim Carrey, Sean Young, Courteney Cox, Tone Loc, and Dan Marino. Based around the Miami Dolphins, NFL team was an added bonus for me as many of my friends at the time did the same. This ticked a few boxes for us then and was a hit at the box office with a cost of $15m it made a return of $107.2m. The success there was not really agreed on by the critics as IMDb gave this 6.9 out of 10 and Rotten Tomatoes I’d go as far as saying hated it with a score of 49%. I cannot see this myself I will get to that later no doubt but first up will be the plot.
Ace Ventura is a ‘weird guy’ (quote by Dan Marino) eccentric character and very unorthodox person. He runs a pet detective agency in Miami who specialises in retrieving tame or captive animals. He is not that successful and is struggling to make his rent because he is feeding a ton of animal’s he has brought home. His apartment doesn’t allow pets either. When the Miami Dolphins football team’s mascot ‘Snowflake’ the bottlenose dolphins is stolen two weeks before the Super Bowl and the police not offering much help the franchise contact Ace to hire his services. Mocked by the police due to his quirkiness he is pretty good at his job and one way or another tracks down the clues that could lead him to the dolphin.
That should be enough of the plot for you. This is just a funny movie and if you love Jim Carrey you’ll love this movie. It has all his quirky stupid stuff that made him famous and really started his movie career. He had appeared in other films before this one but this was the one that really got him traction. It did spawn a sequel and even I will admit that you don’t need to give that one any of your time just run with this one and leave it there. Slightly unfair as there is a couple of funny scenes in there but as a whole my advice is give it the swerve. This is a great funny movie and one that I can confess here that I once watched three times in the same day. As it was on a tape and the tv arial stopped working and I couldn’t be bother to change the tape so I stayed in bed hit rewind and watched it again. I loved this movie because of the stupid humour and Jim’s silly and even sly actions and faces behind people’s back. The store cupboard where he hears the orderly coming and tries to hide in a box is just a joyous scene and will make anyone smile. The mental facility and meeting Finkle’s parents. There are just too many funny scenes for this not to be enjoyed and it should speak volumes that this comedy is in my top 50. American football references everywhere and plenty of actual Dolphin players and coaches to boot just made this movie more enjoyable for me. Like so many comedy movies this has been accused of being anti-this or anti-that which personally I see with every comedy out there so why should this be any different. The difference for me is this is just funny and doesn’t take itself seriously which means the humour just rolls. If you want to get hung up on thing’s then maybe no movie is for you. If you are man or woman enough to cope with something funny then give this one a watch and you should enjoy it.
Next up is a musical made for kids which I love and watch every year…
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