Our adventure starts with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a film which is widely attributed to kicking off Jim Carrey’s mainstream fame, alongside The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. Interestingly all those films were released in the same year, making our hero Jim a very busy little bee indeed during that time.

This was the Jim Carrey film that I remember loving most as a child. At last, a movie about a man who loves animals as much as me! Funnily enough, my memories of the film don’t include the plot or any characters outside of Jim himself. I only remember:

• his multitude of catch-phrases (“aaaaall righty then”, anyone?)
• the “Lion Sleeps Tonight” song from the love-making scene which I recognised as being on a well-worn children’s cassette tape I owned at the time
• this scene

Apparently this was all I needed to be happy when I was eight years old. Not so much twenty years later, as it turns out.

Me and my friend sat in front of the screen expecting to relive our childhood. I suppose perhaps it did bring our childhood back up, if only in the form of bile rising in our gullets to gush forth in a stream of putrescence which would have still been more palatable than watching that film.

The film was not good. Not good at all. Our faces hovered between horror and disgust, both at Jim himself and at our taste in film as children. Not to mention the number of adult fans he made when the film came out.

To say Jim Carrey is bowel-wrenchingly annoying in that film would be an understatement. His face twists and turns with every syllable that leaves his mouth in ways that are not conducive to the communicative task at hand. His body flops about like a fish drowning on land. What was apparently charming to me as a child drove me into a homocidal rage as an adult. My surprising desire to punch his smug face in ebbed ever so briefly each time he said one of his oft-quoted phrases, which admittedly still made their mark (or is that just the nostalgia speaking?), but came flooding back the next time he opened his mouth at a bizarre, rubbery angle. If you’re wracking your brains thinking “no, he wasn’t that bad!” please take a look at this tiny snippet from the film:

Yeah. Sorry about that.

You know what? It’s only been a few weeks since I saw the film, and I still don’t remember the plot. Something about a ring? Or a dolphin? When I reflect now, however, I recall some markedly different things from my childhood.

[This paragraph contains an incredibly large spoiler, but I’d hope that if you’re reading this retrospective you watched the film as a kid too!] So is the film transphobic or just really, really misogynistic? I had absolutely no memory of this element of the story and when it happened my jaw dropped and stayed hanging. I’ve seen somewhere the dismissal from some in the trans community that the film is in fact transphobic (I’m afraid I can’t recall where I read it – feel free to let me know in the comments), but of course the trans experience is not that of a hive mind and there are plenty of trans sources who insist it is, so I’m not going to go easy on Ace for this one. The resolution of the film hinges on a woman being revealed as a “man in a dress”. When Ace finds out this truth, he goes through a huge song and dance of being disgusted that he kissed this person – in the way that only Jim Carrey can – and during the big reveal to the police, he basically sexually assaults the culprit in a comical way which as an adult I found incredibly uncomfortable. I suppose as a child I didn’t really understand the very real threat of sexual violence against women so I saw the comedy in the act, but I can’t really say the joke worked for me in the same way now. I also had no idea how complex gender is, so “ha ha the girl is a boy” was a punchline that must have landed for me back then in a way that just can’t now. [Spoiler ends here!]

Also, there’s like ten minutes of Ace prancing around a mental institution in a tutu pretending to be “crazy”, which I will admit had the odd physical gag which relieved my own personal gag reflex momentarily, so I can see why that scene would have worked for me as a kid. But for 98% of the scene I was mouth agape in sheer horror.

Do the occasional moments of actually brilliant physical comedy and quotables in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective save the film from Jim’s insufferable facial puppetry? Well, my friend and I discussed this in great deal over a few drinks after the conclusion of the film, and no, I don’t think so. The film is nothing without Jim’s performance, and Jim’s performance makes me want to fly over to his house and make sure that while he lives, that face never moves again. Ace’s animal empathy wasn’t enough to endear me to him this time.

My friend has since heard tell that the second Ace Ventura film actually stands the test of time. I’m willing to have my mind changed. If anything, I absolutely refuse to believe that I was such a tacky child that to me Jim Carrey’s performance in Pet Detective was the peak of comedy.

My rating: 1/5 horrid quifs