#MikeCerrone

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Dumb and Dumber To (2014)

20 years have passed since 1994’s Dumb and Dumber and THIS is the sequel we get?! No one was even asking for this movie in the first place, not after that Dumb and Dumberer so what compelled those involved? This picture is so bad it made me question whether or not that first film was any good (don’t worry, it is).

20 years after the events of the first film, Harry (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd (Jim Carrey) are on the road again, this time to find the daughter Harry didn't know he had until today. Without the kidney she can (hopefully) give him, he'll die. On the road, the two idiots have all kinds of comedic adventures.

You have certain expectations from a sequel made two decades after the first. As soon as Dumb and Dumber was a hit, the Farrelly brothers, and leads must've been approached by all kinds of executives to make a sequel, but they turned them down. I’m not going to say that I never laughed. Several jokes are well written and genuinely funny. They're crowded by plenty of old jokes that could've been in any comedy and have been thrown in here to fill pad the time. They don’t even have a good excuse for why it’s taken 20 years for this adventure to happen.

Even if you can look past the initial issue, the movie crumbles. The first movie works because the two protagonists are colossal morons, who despite everything manage ok for themselves. They've adapted to their idiocy but no one else has. Either your interactions with them have you walking away puzzled or accidentally defeated. This second crack at it crashlands in a fiery catastrophe. It simply isn’t funny when the duo passes through unbelievable scenarios, like Harry being asked to speak at a science exhibit. They're supposed to be the only stupid ones but the entire movie's I.Q. is so low it barely has the brains to be funny. Pouring a cold drink down someone’s pants? There’s no punchline there. It's not clever. When you have testicle jokes and the gag is that you SHOW the testicles, then you know you have hit rock-bottom. I don't know what attracted Kathleen Turner to this. If you're a fan of hers, just don't.

I went in with low expectations. That didn't stop me from giving it a chance. I really did. No one wants to sit and be miserable for 109 minutes. I wanted to laugh! Well, I chuckled a few times but mostly I sat there in silence until I had to pause the Dumb and Dumber To and scream inside a pillow to avoid disturbing everyone in the vicinity. If you make it past Lloyd's fantasy sequence, that's the lowest the film gets. It nearly broke me. If you can endure it, you might as well stay to the end where they do have a funny joke about the series' future. (On Blu-ray, March 13, 2015)