Ace Ventura: Pet Detective - February 4, 1994

Ace Ventura Pet Detective

Tagline(s): He's the best there is! (Actually, he's the only one there is.)


Released: February 4, 1994
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures / Morgan Creek Productions

Genre: Comedy

Directed by Tom Shadyac
Stars: Jim Carrey, Courteney Cox, Sean Young, Tone Lōc, Dan Marino

Rotten Tomatoes: 47%
Metacritic: 37%

Budget: $15 million
Box Office: $107.2 million

Synopsis

Jim Carrey is Ace Venture. He's a pet detective which means he traces down missing pets. When the Miami Dolphins loses their dolphin, Ace is called in to track it down.

Recollections

I remember watching this in the cinema while on holiday in Aberdeen and running through the streets doing Jim Carrey's Scotty impression. It's a wonder we made it out of Aberdeen alive.

Review

This was a big year for Jim Carrey with The Mask and then Dumb and Dumber to follow. All very broad comedies which brought in a shed load of money for their studio and made Carrey one of the most bankable film stars of the era behind Tom Hanks. 

Knowing that this kind of broad humour does not typically age well, I watched it with my 5 year old daughter to at least have the pleasure of seeing it anew in her eyes. It did not work and it barely captured her attention. What did capture my attention was how poorly the gender politics have aged and the transphobia on show made me exceedingly uncomfortable both personally and I guess parentally. 5 years old is definitely too early to be exposed to that kind of hate.

Ace Ventura also joins the pantheon of family films that include Ghostbusters and Police Academy, as one with unfortunate fellatio scenes that lead to awkward questions such as "Daddy, why is he swinging from the roof like that"?

This is definitely one of the iconic 1994 pictures but if you have grown at all or learned anything since 1994, you may not want to revisit this particular classic.