Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls – Ace Ventura 2 (1995)

Directed by: Steve Oedekerk | 90 minutes | comedy, adventure | Actors: Jim Carrey, Ian McNeice, Simon Callow, Maynard Eziashi, Bob Gunton, Sophie Okonedo, Tommy Davidson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Danny D. Daniels, Sam Motoana Phillips, Damon Standifer, Andrew Steel, Bruce Spence, Tom Grunke, Arsenio ‘Sonny’ Trinidad, Kristin Norton, Michael Reid MacKay, Kayla Allen, Ken Kirzinger, Dev Kennedy, Patti Tippo, Sabrinah Christie, Warren Sroka, Stacie Kellie, Patrick Michael Strange, Leif Tilden, Gene Williams

Mediocre sequel to the successful ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ from a year earlier. Although the original film was not a huge success, especially with professional critics, after Carrey’s big break the same year with ‘The Mask’, possibilities were seen in the character of the sympathetic animal detective. While that certainly wasn’t a bad idea, a new story was quickly cobbled together, too thin to support Carrey’s jokes. Lead actor Jim Carrey reportedly got $5 million to play in this sequel. Director Tom Shadyac was cast aside (although he would later make ‘Liar, Liar’ (1997) and ‘Bruce Almighty’ (2003) with Carrey) and replaced by Tom DeChercio. At the start of the recordings, he picked up his bags and was in turn replaced by Steve Oedekerk. Not the best choice, since Oedekerk was the writer of the screenplay and this was his second film after his debut with a semi-amateur film eight years (!) earlier. Where Shadyac already had trouble keeping Carrey in check, Oedekerk lets loose the reins way too much. Nor will it have helped that as a writer he would have struggled to cut into his disliked material.

Carrey continues to be a master of physical comedy and has strong impersonations (his fantastic Clint Eastwood remains in the bag this time, but he does a great job of imitating William Shatner and Jack Nicholson. Yet sometimes Carrey is not funny at all because wrong timing, or his antics just bring on a smile, because the scene is milked out for far too long. That’s a shame, because his considerable talent is only partly used. Some of the strongest jokes are even copied straight from the first part: the flawless “rewinding” of an action is the most striking example of this. The catchy one-liners of ‘Pet Detective’ go into recycling, without adding anything new to the repertoire. the reasons that this film has a lot less fans than the original As said, Oedekerk did not write a strong screenplay: after a nice opening that paridies ‘Cliffhanger’ (1993) – but who is that movie still there? – then ridiculing ‘Rambo III’ (which was done much better in ‘Hot Shots! Part Deux’), Ace returns to his old profession to sport a sacred white bat. Assisted by a bumbling Brit (Ian McNeice), he sets out to investigate. No stereotyping about dark Africa is shunned here, which sometimes causes irritation, because the makers regularly fail to make a joke of it. It sometimes seems that it is serious and the image of primitive headhunters that the film sometimes evokes is really outdated.

Anyone who watches the film with more than half an eye will soon realize how the fork is in the stem and who is behind the kidnapping of the white bat. The two most obvious suspects are Simon Callow as the consul Vincent Cadby and Bob Gunton as safari park owner Burton Quinn. Both get too little to do and sleepwalk through the scenes. They probably enjoyed a paid vacation that way. With less than an hour and a half playing time, Ace Ventura’s blunder has actually lasted too long. There was also a computer game and a short-term animated series in circulation in the mid-1990s. Wisely, no green light was given for the next installment… until 2009, when ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Jr.’ was launched on the DVD market. Of course without Carrey, because he had his fill of sequels after ‘Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls’.