Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Mask


Jim Carrey is hot. So hot that you can almost feel your ears burning from the Hollywood buzz currently swarming around his career. Ace Ventura: Pete Detective was an incredibly dumb movie, but it reaped an equally incredible pile of loot at the box office. Carrey's lat­est movie, The Mask, proba­bly also will be a smashing success. Which isn't bad for a guy who's simply a '90s ver­sion of Jerry Lewis, and whose new movie is basically a revamping of The Nutty Professor.

In The Mask, Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, your average Everyman with a rubber face. Ipkiss spends his days slaving as an underpaid bank clerk and his nights as the world's greatest loser at love. Natural­ly, we feel for him — he's more pathetic looking than his dog.

That is, until he discovers the mask of Loki (one of those Norse gods who hang out in comic books). As soon as he slips it on, he becomes a super-human horny guy. Af­ter this point, Carrey spends most of the movie stealing sight gags from old Warner Brothers' cartoons while chasing women. He's not the world's most impressive su­perhero.

Along he way, Carrey takes off with the girlfriend of a mobster (Cameron Diaz) and the guy's money. Mean­while, Carrey's alter ego is be­ing doggedly pursued by a cop (Peter Riegert) and a re­porter (Amy Yasbeck). The only thing he really has to fear, however, is a plagiarism suit from Bugs Bunny's lawyers.

The computer animation in The Mask is great, but the plot falls flat when it deals with anything that wasn't worked out on a storyboard. Most of the jokes are stale, the script is virtually nonexis­tent and watching Carrey be­gins to grate on your nerves — even worse than seeing Jerry do his Labor Day telethon.

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