Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Jim Carrey’s breakout role, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective follows the actor’s larger-than-life title character as he attempts to locate a missing football mascot named Snowball. It’s clear immediately that filmmaker Tom Shadyac, working from a screenplay cowritten with Carrey and Jack Bernstein, isn’t looking to deliver a subtle, low-key satire here, as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which goes over-the-top early and often, zips through one gleefully broad comedic set-piece to the next – with the less-than-understated atmosphere certainly perpetuated on a consistent basis by Carrey himself. The budding star delivers an irresistibly goofy performance that is, for the most part, as endearing as it is hilarious, with Carrey’s go-for-broke approach transforming even the most mundane of sequences into laugh-out-loud funny exercises in unapologetic silliness (eg Ace’s surreptitious attempts at investigating a fancy party). And while the film is likewise packed with a number of memorable moments (eg Ace’s third-act trip to a mental hospital), Ace Ventura: Pet Detective does suffer from a handful of lulls within its entertaining yet somewhat erratic second half – with the movie’s 86 minute running time not entirely able to sustain such a thin premise throughout. This is a fairly minor complaint for a film that still elicits chuckles on an umpteenth viewing, and it’s certainly not difficult to see why Carrey was almost immediately launched into superstardom after its 1994 release.

*** out of ****