Prequel proves it's possible to get stupiderer than 'Dumb and Dumber'

Friday, June 13, 2003

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Almost 10 years after the Farrelly brothers found new life in doofus humor with "Dumb and Dumber," the pointless prequel that no one has been clamoring for stumbles onto screens with all the class of a whoopee cushion at a funeral, and far fewer laughs.

MOVIE REVIEW

DUMB AND DUMBERER: WHEN HARRY MET LLOYD

DIRECTOR: Troy Miller

CAST: Eric Christian Olsen, Derek Richardson,

Luis Guzman, Mimi Rogers, Eugene Levy

RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor, language

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, East Valley 13, Everett 9, Factoria, Galaxy Tacoma 6, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Lewis & Clark, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Woodinville 12

GRADE: D

This is one of the rare films that effectively encapsulates the plot in its title.

Eric Christian Olsen, with a bowl haircut and an unconvincingly blacked-out front tooth, delivers an uncanny impression of Jim Carrey's performance as moronic know-it-all Lloyd, minus the lunatic intensity.

On the first day of school, he collides hard with destiny in the form of Harry, the sweet idiot with the surfer rag-mop hair that Jeff Daniels snorted to life in the original and Derek Richardson re-creates here with sunny optimism and puppy-dog eagerness.

The Farrellys are hardly comic geniuses, but they have a knack for twisting gross-out humor into inspired constructs and treating the social outcasts and the physically handicapped in their oddball mix with the same irreverence and appreciation as their stars. Their absence in this marketing decision is painfully apparent.

The figures in Harry and Lloyd's orbit are dull, warmed over types from every other lame-brained comedy. Eugene Levy can't even find anything funny about the scheming principal who has obsessively recorded and filed away evidence of every embezzlement scam he's pulled on the school.

Shot on a starvation budget by former TV director Troy Miller, who manages to make it look more like a sitcom than a movie, it's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

You can actually see most of that scene played out in the outtakes, but after enduring 80-some minutes of witless fart jokes, feces gags and imbecile idiocy so forgettable they fade as the credits come up, why would you stick around to see what the filmmakers didn't considered funny enough to make the cut?