During the end credits of this belated follow-up to 1994’s gleefully low-brow Dumb and Dumber, there’s a montage juxtaposing scenes from the sequel with snippets from the unexpectedly hilarious original. It’s a cruel gag, seemingly designed to remind you how funny you once found these jokes and how wretchedly turgid they now seem. Throughout the snot bubbles, urine bags and ageing crotch gags of the Farrellys’ latest, I counted a mere three chuckles (one of which I’m fairly sure was unintentional), leaving this several smiles shy of even the widely panned 2003 prequel Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.
All of which is a crushing disappointment, because frankly I would love to have laughed all the way up to the ceiling (like Mary Poppins’s Uncle Albert) at the reuniting of Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey who once mined comedy gold from someone getting ice-tongued to a metal pole. Instead, the pair go through the old farty motions with more heft but less gusto, their faces as saggy and world weary as the arse-cracker jokes they ply. Meanwhile, the Farrellys, who once had a genuinely anarchic edge, demonstrate a fatal lack of timing – missing the film’s comic beat by around 20 years.
