Nerd Movie Reviews

Dumb and Dumber To Review part 1

I’ll give it a B- for effort but an A+ for marketing.

It seems to me a middle ground has to be struck between the producers of a film and the producers of the advertizing trailers as to how much should the trailer give away.  Some movies give hardly anything away leaving you with (a) the fact that a movie was made, (b) the title of the movie, and (c) someone who may or may not appear in the film (let us not forget how Bryan Cranston was all over every trailer for Godzilla possible only to vanish after about 20 minutes of film leaving us with a cast of characters I couldn’t give less of a damn about.  Image courtesy of the horror movie t shirt category).  Some trailers suck every ounce of nourishment from the movie like a starving vampire and leave the actual film lying on the screen like a dedicated corpse.  And of course the optimal trailer hits that sweet spot right in the middle with just enough to peak your interest but not enough to make you feel like you just saw the whole film in 60 seconds.

Dumb and Dumber To unfortunately falls into the second camp.  There were three really good jokes in the film but unfortunately I had seen them about 30 times each thanks to trailers and when they came up in the film I could almost speak the lines myself.  The rest of the jokes were meh-tastic so I guess someone in marketing knows what he or she is doing.

I think I have come up with a perfect analogy to describe most of the jokes in this film.  Imagine you have graduated high school and moved on with your life with nary a look behind you.  You attend the 20 year reunion and at that reunion you end up sitting at a table with the party guy of your class who is desperate to recapture a moment of how cool he was back then before a lifetime of working at a local surf shop and he keeps telling stories that all begin with “Remember the time when…”.  “Remember the time when Eric puked into Gary’s tuba?”  You smile and nod with the vague sense of nostalgia normally reserved for finding a half cup of leftover mac n cheese in the refrigerator.  It’s amusing in a “technically funny” way but the timing is grossly out of whack and at no time do  you feel the need to burst out into belly busting guffaws of laughter like when you first saw Gary blow into a vomit filled tuba.

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