A Life Through Film #004: Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
I am so tired.
Release Date: 11/12/1995
First Weekend At Number One: 11/12/1995
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
I need to talk about Jim Carrey, and I wish it was for a better reason.
When I was a child, there was a brief time where I considered Jim Carrey my favorite actor, despite the fact I almost certainly hadn’t watched any of his movies. I think a particularly charismatic appearance at the Kids Choice Awards was the reason for this. Now that I’ve seen a good chunk of the man’s filmography, I’m not surprised that young Will was so drawn to him.
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By the time I was aware of him in the early 2000s, Carrey was a fully molded comedy megastar. His famous rubber face and a larger than life personality made him one of the highest grossing actors of that era. A transition to more serious, conceptual work around the turn of the millennium let him show off the abilities of a true actor. The goofball was now someone who could adapt to any role, crass or profound.
Jim Carrey has been extremely famous for my entire life. But in the first few months of my life, this level of cultural ubiquity was a new phenomenon for the comic. After a stop-and-start decade of struggling to get noticed in the competitive LA stand up scene, the native Canadian had finally caught his big break. Carrey joined the inaugural cast of In Living Color in 1990 and remained a major part of the sketch comedy show for its entire run until 1994.
In hindsight, it might be easy to dismiss Carrey’s involvement on In Living Color. Maybe you think him more as the token white guy in a racially diverse cast, called on to help parody artists like Vanilla Ice and Snow, seen as appropriators of black culture by show leader Keenen Ivory Wayans.
While those musical spoofs are funny, Carrey was more than them. He was also able to use the show to exhibit the wild characters he would become known for inhabiting in his later movies. I’m particularly fond of his work as Fire Marshall Bill, who I can only describe as a chaos demon using his immortality to teach increasingly terrified people about fire safety.
In 1993, Carrey’s work on In Living Color got him cast in the lead of the low budget comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. In an interview with Howard Stern after the release of the movie, the comedian admitted to taking an atrocious script and making box office gold out of it. The movie was a sensation on its release in ‘94, pulling in over $100 million at the box office, nearly ten times its production budget.
The first Ace Ventura is an important part of Carrey’s story, and it has lived on in pop culture as a well remembered gross out comedy. I don’t really love it, personally. Carrey is electric in it and even imbues the character with the tiniest amount of depth, allowing for a stronger connection between him and the audience. But the movie becomes irredeemably homophobic and transphobic by the end, on top of all the sexism displayed in the rest of the film.
Obviously, when it comes to comedy, anything should be on the table as a topic for skewering. But the ignorance on display is the movie, not a subject of its satire. Having watched the movie in full for the first time within the last couple of years, I can confidently say it’s not one I see myself ever coming back to, despite some good laughs early on [those good parts are strong enough to carry my rating of the original Ace Ventura to a 2.5/5].
Carrey was an extremely busy bee in 1993 and 1994, leading to two more big hits in 1994 to join Ace Ventura. Comic adaptation The Mask allowed the comedian to embody old school Chuck Jones cartoons to great effect [3.5/5], while Dumb and Dumber continued the yuck/yuk styling of Ace Ventura in a way that (mostly) doesn’t feel hateful with the passage of time [3/5].
With the success of these three movies in ‘94, Jim Carrey became the second highest grossing actor at the American box office that year, behind only Tom Hanks. Many dream of this level of sudden success, of all the hard work finally paying off. I’m sure Carrey dreamed of it as he grinded it out night after night in every LA comedy club that would have him. But that success did a number on the comedian’s mental wellbeing.
Amid his legendary 1994, Carrey’s father, both a major inspiration to the comic as well as a recurring source of economic instability during his childhood, passed away. In the middle of the grieving process, the comedian put his energy into his role as The Riddler in Batman Forever during that movie’s filming in late ‘94. To each his own, of course, but grief takes time to process. Carrey barely pausing his work to process his emotions after the loss of his father feels to me like someone avoiding his real struggles with their acting.
At the start of 1995, Carrey and his wife of 8 years, Melissa Womer, filed for divorce. In the press, she explained that the separation was a result of Carrey’s constant need to work over the previous two years. The two had originally met when he was a standup and she was a waitress, kindred souls trying to make it in LA. Once he started flying across the country for film projects, the emotional distance became too great.
Publicly, Carrey downplayed the seriousness of the separation while Womer expressed concern for his mental wellbeing. “I’m nervous for him,” she told Rolling Stone in the summer of 1995.
I think creative people need to be aware of the dark side that accompanies those gifts that they have.
I’ve learned that the smile he wears is the biggest mask of all.
At the same time that Carrey was going through his divorce, starting a new relationship with Dumb and Dumber co-star Lauren Holly, processing his newfound success, mourning the loss of his father, and anxiously waiting to gauge the success of his first major blockbuster, another issue reared its ugly head at him.
Morgan Creek Productions, the studio behind Ace Ventura, wanted to make a sequel to capitalize on Carrey’s boom in popularity. You would think that a workhorse like Jim Carrey would jump at the opportunity to do another project. But he wasn’t interested, citing a disinterest in sequels to his work that would continue through most of his career.
I haven’t been able to verify this with a concrete source, but I’ve found a few sites online that claim that Carrey only did the sequel due to a contractual obligation. I have no doubt he had the capital at that point to beat a potential lawsuit if it came to that, but maybe he was extra conscious of his celebrity image at the time. Such a public figure going to court with the studio behind his big breakout film to prevent a sequel from happening was bad optics all around.
In the spring of 1995, Carrey, perhaps under the guillotine of potential legal action, started shooting Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.
You’re probably wondering why it’s taken me so long to get to the actual subject of this review. The reason is twofold. First, I find Jim Carrey to be a fascinating character, especially around this time, and I wanted to establish full context for the film.
Second, I think this movie is pretty bad and would rather be writing about literally anything else.
The plot, as it were, involves the titular pet detective traveling to Africa and finding a missing albino bat in an effort to stop a catastrophic war between two native tribes. The movie is so unconcerned with the actual details of this setup that they are literally skipped over in an expository scene so that we can have a joke about Ventura spitting a mountain of peanut shells on someone.
Carrey is unhinged to the absolute maximum here, a result of him given unlimited ability to adlib his performance. One perk of him coming back to make the movie was that the star was able to pick any director he wanted to helm the film. After a few weeks of not gelling with first time director Tom DeCerchio, Carrey had him fired before replacing him with the screenwriter for the film, his close friend Steven Oedekerk.
Oedekerk, another In Living Color veteran who hadn’t directed a feature film to this point, removed the last of any strings from Carrey. The frantic improvisation that the comedian spews during nearly the entire movie is unhinged and occasionally incomprehensible. It’s apparent as you watch that nearly every scene just serves as an excuse to allow the comic to act as whacky as possible.
Having watched all of Carrey’s film work from 1994, I’m used to his style of performance in these kinds of comedies. I can say without a doubt this is the most annoyed I have ever been by him. He’s not even spouting jokes most of the time, just random things that come to mind with only a tangential connection to what’s happening around him. Both Carrey and Ventura clearly do not care about the actual story of the film here. The actor just bastardizes his old character in an effort to give the studio the movie they think they want.
The effect is a main character that is just so hard to be cool with. Most of the “comedy” is derived by Ace thinking that the cultures of the native African groups he interacts with are silly and worth mocking. And boy, does he mock them. He starts talking gibberish to make fun of their language, he destroys their sacred sites for a bit, and he even sexually exploits the young princess of a tribe. It’s like a big analogy for colonial devastation of Africa in 18th and 19th centuries, except packaged in a way that’s supposed to make eleven-year-olds guffaw in uproarious laughter.
I mean, at least there isn’t any transphobia in this one. But the tone of When Nature Calls is such that if this movie had come out just a decade earlier, there would have been a strong chance of at least one scene of Carrey in blackface.
I’m not surprised that the best remembered joke from When Nature Calls is the scene where a naked Ace Ventura is “birthed” from a mechanical rhino as oblivious tourists watch. It’s not peak comedy by any means, but in a movie where nearly every other bit felt either extremely slapdash or bordering on a hate crime, a special effect that required even a modicum of careful planning and no racism shines in comparison.
The worst bits (besides the racist ones) are the jokes that are just transplanted directly from the first movie. Twice in When Nature Calls, Ventura drives a car with his head out the window, parks it disastrously, and shouts “Like a glove!” During moments like this, as well as every other time Carrey hit a catchphrase from the first film (I lost count on the number of times he said “Reheheheheally?” but it clears double digits easily), I could feel the movie expecting me to clap and cheer in glorious recognition. I did neither.
Production of the film was rushed both so that Carrey didn’t miss the promotional tour for Batman Forever and so that the studio could rush it out in time for the holidays. I’ll never pretend to know what someone is thinking at a given time, but the stress of making a movie he didn’t want to be a part of under a tight deadline amid all those other stressors in his life must have been a nightmare for Jim Carrey. In a way, it comes across in his performance.
Unlike in the first movie, where he had a semblance of humanity, Ace Ventura comes off as a total asshole to everyone in this film. He’s the one person who gets to be overtly goofy in a world full of straight men, and the result just makes him seem like an unlikeable person on every single level. Even when he’s being crass and rude to the British consulate, the villains of the movie, it feels less like he’s antagonizing them for being bad and more that he’s antagonizing them just for being next to him.
For the record, Carrey isn’t a fan of this movie either. He’s reported to find the humor too often at the expense of the native characters. He also thought that the character quirk of Ventura being afraid of bats made absolutely zero sense. While I agree with both these points, I’d also like to point out that as the star of the movie with a puppet writer/director working to make him look as good as possible, Jim Carrey had full control over all these elements that he disliked.
Like with Get Shorty last week, I’m not surprised that Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls topped the weekend box office. After all, it’s a sequel to a big hit movie starring a big hit actor. I’m also not surprised it only remained number one for a week before sliding out of the limelight. It’s an annoying movie to watch, and if I’m at the movie theater in late 1995, I have a plethora of options at my disposal before I go see this piece of shit again.
Like many bad movies with a big star and good marketing, the movie ended up making a ton of money despite only topping the box office for one weekend. That opening pull of $37 million was big though, and ended up being over a third of the movie’s overall domestic gross by the end of its run. When you factor in international markets, the movie, which ends with the antagonist being sexually assaulted by a gorilla, made over $200 million on a $30 million budget. Despite releasing near the very end of the year, When Nature Calls would end up being the 5th highest grossing movie of 1995.
Critics weren’t big fans of Carrey’s work at the time, and this movie was no exception, as it still sits at a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes. While it and its lead did nab a Kids Choice Award for both Favorite Movie and Favorite Movie Actor respectively1, most of Hollywood was less kind. When Nature Calls was nominated for Worst Remake or Sequel at the Razzies that year, and won a whole slew of statues at the Stinker Awards, including Worst Sequel and Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy.
The character of Ace Ventura lingered on as a cartoon on television until the year 2000, and the only other film in the series ended up being a 2009 prequel set during Ventura’s childhood. Carrey was involved with neither version of the character. Morgan’s Creek has been trying for decades to get him to sign onto another sequel, to no luck. Should have made a better second movie guys!
In the grand scheme of his career, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is a minor pitstop for Jim Carrey. Batman Forever did massive business at the summer box office a few months before this, ensuring another blockbuster year for him, even with only two movies out in 1995. I find this movie interesting given the context of where he was in his life and career, but as an actual piece of entertainment? Hard pass on ever watching it again.
Rating: 1/5
Next Week: “A Life Through Film” will return in…Goldeneye!
Also side note: there are obvious worse movies you could show to your kid, but my future children are watching the selected works of Bong Joon-Ho long before I ever think that maybe it’s time to throw on the Ace Ventura movies.