A Series of Unfortunate Jim Carrey Scenes

my rating: Nathan's rating:

It was through a series of unfortunate events that I came to see Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The movie that Nathan and I had intended to see had been canceled due to a projector failure, and our second choice wasn't going to be showing for another hour. So we went to see ASoUE.

It's not a bad film. It's more like two films - one good, the other abysmal - spliced together. One film was a kind of subtle and dark comedy, about three children whose parents are killed in a suspicious fire, and their struggles to deal with the world on their own. The other film is a Jim Carrey comedy, in which a rubber-faced slapstick screwball actor chews the scenery.

I haven't read (or talked to anyone who has read) any of the Lemony Snicket books, so maybe that wacky stuff was in there. But I suspect it was more a matter of the producers being worried that a story about children surrounded by murders and other unfortunate events would be too "heavy", and the humor derived from the narration too "dry"... so they let Carrey do his moronic overacting schtick every so often.

Those bits actually drew a fair amount of chuckles from the audience. But the chucklers were probably bored in between. I, on the other hand, got tired of Carrey just after seeing the bits from the trailer, in the early scene in which his character meets the kids. The irony is that Carrey plays several different roles over the course of the film, supposeldy giving him a chance to show off the different characters he can do. But they're all just the same generic cartoon character he plays in his screwball comedies... in costume with accents. What makes it especially ironic is that Carrey can play other roles effectively. (I loved Truman and Eternal Sunshine.) But not this one.