Me Myself and Irene Review

You know where you stand with the Farrelly Brothers – downwind. Re-teamed with Dumb and Dumber star Jim Carrey, the gross-out kingpins who gave you Jeff Daniels’ arse-blasting diarrhoea scene in that film, and Cameron Diaz’s sperm hair-gel quif in There’s Something About Mary, pile on the bad taste jokes with the usual gusto. There are African-American dwarf jokes, dead cow jokes, creepy albino waiter jokes, giant dildo jokes (Ouch!) and live-chicken-up-the-butt jokes (Very ouch!). Also, Carrey struts his stuff as a Rhode Island lawman with a seriously split personality: sweet-natured state trooper Charlie Baileygates and his aggressive, foul-mouthed alter ego Hank.

Left with black triplets when his wife runs off with the dwarf wedding-limo driver, Charley bottles up his anger for fifteen years, raising his giant, brainy kids without a murmur. But then he finally loses it, and is diagnosed with, "advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage”. Prescription pills keep a lid on it at first, but very soon he’s off the medication, off his head and on the road, driving fugitive fraudster Irene Waters (Renee Zelwegger) back to upper New York State on his motorcycle. While Irene is falling for Charlie and wrestling with the sex-crazed Hank, some crooked cops bent on silencing Irene for good are in hot pursuit. So too are Charlie’s state trooper buddies and his concerned kids.

Carrey is as crazy and inventive as ever, but is given too little to work with. He does what he can with the predictable switches of character, but the inevitable showdown between his sweet and nasty personae is a slightly disappointing re-run of a very similar scene in Liar, Liar. The scowly Renée Zelwegger, so perfect in Nurse Betty, seems a little out of her depth here as the put-upon but feisty Irene, although she can be forgiven for not holding her own in the face of Carrey’s wild, manic excesses. By contrast, as Charlie’s super-smart kids, Mongo Brownlee, Jerod Mixon and Anthony Anderson threaten to steal the show with their scabrous jive-talk and good-natured intellectual banter: "He thinks calculus was a Roman Emperor.” The plot is clunky and episodic, but that won’t bother die-hard Carrey and Farrelly Brothers fans, who may have hoped for more, but will be content to settle for a little less.