Me, Myself, & Irene

An emotionally challenged Rhode Island state trooper is suddenly altered into two split personalities when all of his unresolved feelings break out into an aggressive personality of their own. This disorder comes into major play as he escorts a young lady out of state, and suddenly finds both of his personalities fighting over her.

Jim Carrey’s three black sons in this movie are hilarious, but the rest of the film is bland at best, with a couple of laugh-out loud scenes, many flat and obvious jokes, a lame story which goes nowhere, and Carrey seemingly trying too hard to make us laugh. I can’t really put my finger on the exact thing which didn’t work in this movie, but after the first 20 minutes or so, I just sort of sat there and smirked sporadically. Most of the time, I was annoyed by the lengthy musical interludes between scenes, the Zellweger factor, which we’ll get into later and the “forced” comedy, especially all the gross jokes and the physical comedy by Carrey, which just didn’t seem to work for me this time around. Mind you, I did hear a lot of others in the audience laughing, and God knows this is the kind of movie which someone either “gets” or not, but with its lengthy run-time and a surprisingly distracting character in Carrey as his second personality Hank, the film just left me feeling sort of blah. Of course, many people thought KINGPIN sucked, and I totally loved that film, so perhaps this movie might jiggle your funny bones, but for me, the buck stopped here. I’d rather watch DUMB AND DUMBER over this any day.

Now I don’t know whether or not my disinterest in this film has to do with me having reached my saturation level on gross-out jokes (although I highly doubt it…I’m a pretty messed up guy), the fact that the movie actually tried to focus more on the story than any previous Farrelly film, or the fact that the leading lady, Renee Zellweger, was just plain ol’ boring. But whatever the reason, I can’t honestly recommend that you see this movie in the theatres, unless you did actually find the trailer somewhat amusing, since most of the jokes run around that sort of gamut anyway. The corny name-calling didn’t really work for me, the rehashed “crazy” dude that they pick up didn’t really work for me, and Carrey’s irritating Dirty Harry voice didn’t really work for me. The one thing that did really work for me was the first third of the film (before Zellweger got in there), with its comforting feel, funny jokes, and three black sons. Unfortunately, the rest of the film lost that same feel inside an idiotic plot which I honestly didn’t really care about, and Carrey’s physical gags, which just left me with a strong sense of deja-vu. Mind you, I didn’t hate the film by any means, in fact, I was thinking about recommending it even slightly for the black son scenes alone, but in the end, the film just sort of disappeared from my mind after a couple of minutes, and it certainly can’t be put in the same category as any of the big hits from any of its prime participants. In the end, there was something about this movie that just didn’t work.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian