‘Ace Ventura’ at 30: Jim Carrey’s Problematic Big Screen Breakthrough Was Never Designed to Mature Gracefully

Late in the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, there’s a scene where professional but unconventional sleuth Ace (Jim Carrey) is snooping around a storage room at a mental-health facility (disguised as a patient, naturally) when someone approaches the door. Desperate not to be caught, he attempts to cram himself into the cardboard box he’s been rifling through, but as slim and elastic as he is, he can’t quite manage it. He bends, squirms, and wriggles, sticking out at odd angles, until… false alarm; the custodian about to enter the room decides not to, just before the box that can barely contain Ace’s twisted frame finally collapses outright. It’s a throwaway bit of slapstick that might as well double as the philosophy behind the making of the movie itself: You’re not going to fit into the box, so don’t try forcing yourself – especially when you’re not sure anyone is actually going to be watching.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective just turned 30 this month, which seems wrong. This movie shouldn’t be 30 years old. It should remain perpetually adolescent. It should be, at best, 15. But 30 years have indeed passed since the movie came from basically nowhere, rocketing Jim Carrey from In Living Color second-stringer to movie stardom. What lingers three decades later is its frenzied audacity in placing Carrey front and center, with a deranged yet correct belief that his knowing affectations, his bizarre parodies of human movement, would connect with audiences. Though it does so literally, as part of Carrey’s anything-for-a-laugh ethos, the movie does not make any thematic attempt to cram its star into a predetermined box.

The movie’s faith pays off – though not necessarily with huge laughs. Rewatching it after so many years, I’m not sure that I laughed out loud once. Yet I smiled a lot, and there’s little flop sweat in the movie; Carrey delivers a singularly compelling performance as Ace, a private detective with a peculiar specialization in locating missing animals. You can imagine a freakish backstory for Ace (and frankly, it’s a miracle that no one has yet, at least not committed to the direct-to-video record), something involving a childhood boy-and-his-dog story that arrests him a state of attention-demanding neediness after the dog mysteriously disappears. But thankfully, none of that is provided here. Ace Ventura just likes animals – seemingly not out of a particularly gentle nature, but perhaps because he relates to them more readily than he does to humans by simple default.

There’s a glimmer of old-fashioned craft in the mostly-rickety story; the framework of a detective plot, in which Ace must track down the missing real-dolphin mascot for the Miami Dolphins football team, proves just sturdy enough to Carrey around with various soloing antics. The movie, barely over 80 minutes before the credits roll, therefore has a certain momentum missing from its various off-brand descendants that mistakenly assumed the appeal of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective derived from its descriptive title. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo sound funny, but detectives, even pet detectives, have clients and cases and suspects, which imposes the bare minimum of structure upon the central comedian’s madness.

Of course, both Dickie Roberts and Deuce Bigalow come from the Happy Madison factory, and while Adam Sandler was already performing on SNL when Ace Ventura hit it big, Carrey’s geeky aggression certainly anticipates early Sandler vehicles like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. As with Sandler characters, there’s more than a hint of antisocial menace behind Ace’s kid-friendly clowning. Like a child on the cusp of adolescence, his silly antics can turn to bullying at the drop of a hat, though the movie labors to keep him on the side of righteousness. The animals help, just as Happy Gilmore’s devotion to his sweet old grandmother just-barely mitigates what might otherwise seem like the behavior of a violent sociopath.

Well, mostly righteous, anyway; eventually, the plot of Ace Ventura (such as it is) turns on a gender-switch twist that manages to be both deeply misogynistic and wildly transphobic. It would be echoed a few months later with the third Naked Gun movie; around a year after The Crying Game scored a ton of Oscar nominations, hacky comedy writers could think of nothing funnier than appropriating its central twist and treating it with “funny” horror rather than sensitivity. (And contrary to what some will say, it hasn’t taken 30 years to curdle this particular trend; plenty of critics noted the nasty edge to this supposed gag back in 1994.)

Even at the time, Carrey described the montage of Ace’s outsized reactions to having kissed a trans woman (or a cross-dressing male? That’s how it’s treated in the film, but suffice to say the character isn’t afforded the kind of psychological attention to clarify) as intentionally obnoxious, cartoonish, and “unreal,” rather than a point of identification. That doesn’t really come through – Ace is intentionally obnoxious throughout the film, and generally depicted as the hero your inner twelve-year-old desires, so his over-the-top reaction may be silly, but isn’t presented as especially bigoted – but it does point to the character’s balletic hybrid of sideshow geek and hyper-physical jock, right down to the athleticism with which Carrey nonsensically plunges his own face to purge himself of icky trans germs. A comedy that might initially feel like some kind of revenge of a nerd is actually, in retrospect, a reassertion of white-guy centrality in comedy. Consider that the comic superstar of the 1980s was Eddie Murphy, who often turned his vehicles into de facto one-man shows; here now was a gangly Caucasian goon (from In Living Color, no less!) soloing even harder, even less interested in any of his costars, and using the basic outsider-detective framework of Beverly Hills Cop to bring his goofiness to the masses. It feels queasily fitting that Carrey’s world-beating year – The Mask and Dumb and Dumber were both released later in 1994 to even bigger numbers – coincided with Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop III flopping that summer.

The undertones of grievance, which come part and parcel with Ace’s aggression, don’t detract from, and maybe even perversely fuel, the indelibility of Carrey’s performance. (Not least because Murphy really is listless in Cop III.) I hadn’t seen Ace Ventura straight through in decades, yet watching it again, countless Carrey gesticulations and poses were instantly familiar: Carrey driving his half-wrecked car with his head jutting out of the side window; Carrey bobbing his whole body up and down in an exaggerated sneak-walk (it’s no wonder he was cast as the Grinch); Carrey thrusting his body in a deranged victory dance.

Occasionally, director Tom Shadyac actually tries to frame his action in a funny way, as when Ace fakes a mental illness and football fixation, running plays in the background of a scene while characters converse in the foreground. Mostly, though, Carrey appears to be directing himself, as unfair a judgment as this may be. Shadyac obviously brought some measure of collaboration and comfort to his leading man; they’d go on to collaborate twice more, on Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, two of Carrey’s biggest-ever hits. Liar Liar hones Carrey’s physical lunacy into one-man battle scenes, but by the time they get to Bruce, his high-energy limb-whipping and word-elongation (“it’s gooood” being a poor man’s “allllrighty then!”) feels obligatory. Despite the vastness of the film’s premise, it’s like he’s stuck performing in that cardboard box.

Carrey would go on to give other, better performances; I Love You, Phillip Morris is one of his funniest (if least-seen). His adult-onset adolescence couldn’t last forever. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was a big enough hit in 1995 to warrant another quick follow-up; bless Carrey that he made The Cable Guy instead and then moving on to the likes of The Truman Show, seeming to sense that a third Ace Ventura might outstay the character’s welcome. Ace himself is a nominal adult, but he’s not really meant to age. It’s more fitting that he would more or less disappear, leaving behind a bendy series of VHS-circulated monuments to the bravado of refusing to act your age.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.