Dumb and Dumber Review

The trick, and it is a real one, is that neither Harry nor Lloyd is ever played as a target. Jim Carrey was at the absolute peak of his physical control here and uses every bit of it, but the performance is warm rather than superior, and Jeff Daniels, a serious dramatic actor at the time, matches him without once signaling that he knows he is slumming. That mutual sincerity is why the film keeps working while most of the gross-out comedies around it curdled.

The plot is a road picture with a ransom briefcase in it, functional and forgettable, and the Farrellys shoot it with no visual ambition whatsoever. What the film has instead is a hit rate: the toilet, the parking spot, the most annoying sound in the world, the sheepdog van. There are long stretches in the second half where the story asks for a caper it cannot deliver, and Lauren Holly is handed nothing to play. But the two leads are so precisely tuned to each other that the film survives every structural problem it has.