Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is a remarkable movie — remarkable in its stupidity, remarkable in its dearth of comedy, remarkable, most of all, for the apparent inability of its filmmakers to perceive the movie's culturally dangerous messages and racist overtones (at least, I hope it's denseness, because if director/writer Steve Oedekerk intended those messages, he shouldn't have trouble getting David Duke and Patrick Buchanan to back his next project).
In this sequel to last year's hit comedy, pet detective Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) finds himself employed by a British diplomat to find and return a white bat held sacred by one of the primitive tribes in the diplomat's territory; if Ace fails, the tribe will end up at war with another tribe and, the diplomat tells Ace, he doesn't want a bloodbath to occur on his watch. It's hardly a new story, really, straight from the Jungle Jim "B" flicks of the 1940s, with Carrey a demented descendent of Johnny Weismuller, meeting up with treacherous Australian hunters bent on destroying the native peoples and exploiting the jungle's resources for their own aims.
That the film has such a simple, familiar plot is not necessarily a problem. Just as we don't watch Top Hat or Swing Time for the story, we don't watch a Jim Carrey film expecting that the script will approach the complexity and depth of something by Ingmar Bergman or Death of a Salesman. We watch Top Hat for Astaire and Rogers, and we watch Ace Ventura because Carrey is such a brilliant and manic comedian; you may find his humor vulgar in the first film, with its wall-to-wall adolescent sexual and scatological jokes, but you laugh despite your judgment, because Carrey is so over-the-top, so spontaneous that he catches you up.
But When Nature Calls is not funny, not at all — and this is not just my opinion. I saw the film on a Friday night in a full theater, and never once did the entire audience burst into delighted laughter the way it will when a comedy is working; never once. Minutes and minutes would pass with Carrey mugging away on the screen, and there would be a chuckle here and there in the theater, but nothing more.
The problem is that Oedekerk doesn't seem to understand how humor works; he doesn't seem to understand how to construct a joke, how to film physical humor; he doesn't seem to understand pacing; he doesn't seem to understand that it's not the punchline alone that makes us laugh, but that the set-up and the wait for the punchline are vital parts of the anatomy of humor.
Take, for example, a scene early on in When Nature Calls. Ace arrives at the consulate where he's to meet the diplomat who's hiring him. There's a fancy party going on, couples in tuxedos and fancy gowns, trays of drinks and food; on the lawn, men are playing polo. Ace walks into the party and begins to play with the food on the buffet, messing up the carefully arranged hors d'oeuvres, making fangs out of asparagus spears, being a general nuisance. We're supposed to laugh at this, the naughty boy among the stuffy rich, and we've laughed at similar shticks a hundred times before — think of Groucho Marx ruffling Margaret Dumont's feathers, or of the Marx Brothers at any high society event in any of their films, or of Jim Carrey in the police station of the first Ace Ventura film, or at the society bash he goes to.
But we don't laugh at the scene in When Nature Calls because Oedekerk has forgotten to set up an important part of the joke.
In Ace Ventura, when Carrey goes to the police station early on, and disrupts the place, literally making the police the butt of his jokes, the film has already shown the police as deserving of whatever Carrey dishes out: they're rude to him, condescending and belittling. The film carefully makes certain that we don't like them and so we enjoy it when Carrey turns the tables. It's why we laughed when Groucho Marx tweaked the rich in the 1930s, because they were full of themselves, bloated with ego, and he was just letting off some of their hot air.
When Nature Calls, however, leaves out the first part of the equation; it doesn't take the necessary time to make us dislike the wealthy, or it expects that we'll naturally dislike them, because they dress well and ride ponies. But it's not enough; while we laughed with and rooted for Ace in the first film because he was the underdog kicked time and again by everyone else, here we don't laugh because it's Ace who's doing the kicking. He's just a jerk and a comedic bully.
More seriously, however, Odekerk misses some fairly disturbing social messages that his film contains. For example, on the one hand, the film preaches a kind of anti-imperialistic gospel; the bad guys are the bad guys in the end because they exploit the native peoples for their own gains. But Ace is just as guilty of cultural insensitivity. For example, when he arrives at the village from which the bat has been stolen, he goes into the shrine and accidentally stands on the altar. The tribesmen threaten him, saying that no one may stand on the altar. As soon as they turn their backs, Carrey does a bit of dance on the altar, walking all over it; later in the film, dusting it for fingerprints, he destroys it. You may not come from a culture that holds a bat sacred, but if you're a hero in a movie that's, on the one hand, condemning white imperialism in Africa, you don't, on the other, show such blatant disrespect for the native people's beliefs.
(The film also suffers from another bit of inconsistency: It's no less an imperialistic message to propose that the only savior for a black African tribe is a white outsider.)
The buzz for the film is that it's intended to appeal to 12-year-old boys. If I was one of them, I'd file a class action suit for insulting me. This film is so bad, in fact, that a civil suit may not be the proper means to deal with those who perpetrated it.
I think we're talking a criminal case here, a capital offense at least.
by Joe Schuster
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