Hilarious Ace Tracks Laughs as Blundering ‘Pet Detective’

In “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” TV comic Jim Carrey plays a goofball investigator who tackles the theft of a famous dolphin--the mascot of the Miami football team--and in the process sends up other famous movie moments, including the surprise from “The Crying Game.” (Rated PG-13.)

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Jim Carrey is funny. Head lowered, neck out, eyes full of childlike enthusiasm, his whole face quivers and stretches into places no human face has ventured before.

In this movie, kids--especially those familiar with Carrey’s Fire Marshal Bill character from “In Living Color”--loved him hands down.

The film itself, however, earned mixed reviews.

“There’s nothing much to the plot; it’s not involved or anything,” said Tod McGill, 13. “It was a little corny, (but) it was funny enough to make it good. It was funny because (Carrey) was always overacting. For his first movie, he did really well.”

Like “Wayne’s World” without the wit, this movie celebrates adolescent boys’ humor: slapstick, bathroom jokes and raunch. Mostly, it seemed to attract and delight boys 12 to 14, who laughed straight through from the beginning credits, when Carrey in a delivery-man disguise manhandles a box marked “fragile,” to the ending credits, when he picks a fistfight with another football mascot, a parrot.

One group of boys, pumped up by TV trailers and the celebration of a friend’s birthday (“the Big One-Three”), couldn’t praise “Ace Ventura” enough. Asked to rank it on a scale of 1 to 5, they variously awarded the movie a 5, a 6, a 7 1/2 and a 99.

“There’s laugh after laugh,” said birthday guy Chris Defarkas, sounding suspiciously like a plant from the publicity department. “There isn’t a slow moment.”

His friends all waved two thumbs in the air; some mimicked Fire Marshal Bill, while others hoped for a sequel.

“I’m there,” said Shane Ellis, 14.

But teen-age boys weren’t the only ones who liked the teen-age boy humor, as Jon Hugstad, 14, pointed out. “I had an older gentleman sitting next to me. He was laughing just as hard.”

Shane said his favorite part was one that made some other kids uncomfortable--a scene in which a woman’s true sexual identity is discovered by a telltale bulge in her skivvies.

“I was dying!” he said. “I watched ‘The Crying Game,’ and I got that part. And the music just added to it. It was ‘Crying Game’ music.”

Tiffany Thair, 11, was also dying, but for another reason. “It was just kind of sick,” she said.

Mike Wile, 13, said he also saw the R-rated “The Crying Game” and thought it, too, was sick.

“After that I had dinner, and I didn’t even feel good enough to eat,” he said.

Another group of boys gave the movie lower marks--a 4, a 3 and a 2.

“I thought it was funny, but it had no plot,” said Evan Kennedy, 12.

As I recall, and none too easily, the story line follows the laughingstock pet detective Ventura as he traces a tiny gemstone found in the empty dolphin tank to the rings awarded in a past Super Bowl game.

He tracks down every team member (while jogging, in the shower, mailing a letter, at a fancy cocktail party) to check out their rings, before he finally narrows down the list of suspects.

“The plot kept changing,” said Elliott Rushovich, 13. “They kept making it more funny so you wouldn’t really care if you didn’t understand it, because it was so funny.”

Like me, they agreed Carrey can be hilarious. I was amazed by his on-target imitation of a football player in slow motion and then in reverse. But a little goes a very long way.

“If they had a sequel, that would be overdoing it,” Tod said. “It would be too much of a funny thing.”