Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

The French think Jerry Lewis is the best comedian in history, I’ve watched some of his movies but they’re just not funny to me. Steve Martin was highly acclaimed by critics for his performance in “The Jerk,” although I preferred him when he acted normal again. So I’m probably not going to see “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” The star is Jim Carrey, an all purpose white guy on TV’s “In Living Color,” who plays a Miami detective specializing in animals. He’ll find your lost bird or your kidnapped pedigree dog. Or, as the movie opens, he’s hired by the Miami Dolphins football team to find their mascot, a dolphin named Snowflake that has been stolen.

Then Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino also disappears.

Carrey plays Ace as if he’s being paid by the calories expended. He’s a hyper goon who likes to screw his mouth into strange shapes while babbling incoherently it looks like someone is trying to yank a sentence out of him with a clothespin. He keeps so many animals at home that he sometimes seems more like one of those zookeepers on late-night talk shows who always have marmots crawling out of their collars. And he is both the best and worst detective in this or any other movie.

Eventually involved are Sean Young, much too talented for roles like Lt. Einhorn of the Miami police department; Udo Kier, once a distinguished German actor-director, now Ronald Camp, sinister millionaire; Courteney Cox, as the Dolphin’s chief publicist; and Noble Willingham as the team’s owner. Most of these people look as if they would rather be in other movies. Sean Young is such a good sport she even allows herself to be photographed with dolphins.

The plot thickens (which is undoubtedly what happened after Dan Marino disappeared) with clues that lead us underground into Miami’s fabulously wealthy society of porpoises. Yes, yes, I know dolphins aren’t porpoises, but never mind. And the movie’s climax is at least perceptive: “Ace Ventura” ends with a sequence that could be borrowed from one of those horrible old Tarzan movies where Boy falls into the piranha pool and Tarzan has to rescue him before Jane can lower herself to do it.

You will recall that Jane was played by Maureen O’Sullivan.

Jim Carrey is a rubber-faced Canadian comedian who starred on TV in something called “The Duck Factory,” about which the less said the better. Since then he confided to an interviewer that his ambition was to become an American movie star so he could enthrall millions and then use his powers of hypnosis to make them all buy him houses. The houses would be large ones. In Bel-Air.

He will have to look for another way to achieve this ambition after “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” There are individual moments in this movie that are very funny. But they’re finally just moments, and the rest is a long slog through recycled story ideas and scatological yuks delivered at a manic pace by Carrey, who looks desperate to generate laughs any kind of laughs. While watching it, I couldn’t help thinking about Robin Williams’ manic performances in laugh starved flops such as “Toys.” Kids might like this movie. But then kids often eat French fries one at a time and think they’re getting away with something.

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