Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Is this as bad as the critics say? Yes and no. If you like Adam Sandler movies, you will like this. If you were a huge fan of the original movie (like me) then you might enjoy seeing the characters again on screen. There are a couple of parts that made me smile or chuckle. Big laughs, not so much. The biggest problem for me is that this is a sequel to my favorite comedy of all-time and it is not even close in quality. The people who made this film really miss the point of what made the original great. The original film established the characters as grown men with the mental capacity of 7 year old boys. For much of the original the characters have a sort of innocence about them which made them endearing. In this sequel that innocence is gone completely. In fact they come across as mean and dangerous. An example of this can be seen in the plot. In the original Harry and Lloyd go on a road trip to return a “lost” briefcase to a woman. Although they had their own reasons, the basic actions have some form of good intentions. In the sequel they turn the characters into deadbeat dads who search for their daughter to ask for a kidney and for the other to marry her. The plot changes these characters immediately into bad people, and their entire goal is self-serving. This is reflected in the entire film. They become less fun to watch this time around because they are really hard to root for. The comedy in the sequel has a much meaner edge to it. In the original they are stupid but they don’t seem malicious in what they do. Nothing they do is done with bad intention. In part two Harry and Lloyd do things that are mean the entire film. They end with them pushing two strangers into the bushes for giggles. The way they treat Harry’s parents is awful. The way they treat most everyone in the film is….just bad. It does not translate to one laugh. The comedy is packed full of gags, and very few of them seem to push the story forward. The first Dumb and Dumber a lot of what happens happens, happens within the context of the story. Not every minute had to have a joke. The sequel almost seems desperate because of the number of jokes they try and pack into the movie mostly at the cost of a coherent story. Most of what is done has no purpose (and most of the jokes are very forgettable). Another big problem with the sequel is the setting. In the original, the dumb duo is set in reality. All the supporting characters serve as the straight men. Great comedy needs the combo of crazy played against the straight man. The sequel’s supporting characters are every bit as crazy and unusual as the leads. There is nothing to ground this movie. It is a lot like Neighbors which came out earlier this summer. When everything is crazy it just becomes a bunch of noise, their is no nuance to it. After a while it all just runs together and nothing seems funny because there is no normal reaction to relate to. Lastly, what made early Farrely Brother comedies great was that their movies and characters had big hearts. We could relate and actually like the characters in these movies (which include Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal, Me, Myself and Irene, and even Stuck on You). There were moments where the characters revealed something true about themselves. The directors cared about these characters and they were treated with respect despite their obvious faults. In this sequel, Harry and Lloyd were not treated this way. They were treated like stock characters and there for laughs only. No one, not the writer or director, had any reverence for these characters. And since they didn’t why should we? So in conclusion they took 20 years to make a careless cash grab of a sequel to a movie that I hold high regard for. A lot more care should have been taken with these characters and it surprises me a lot that the original writer/directors were involved with this movie and this was the outcome? The plot itself was fairly generic. Couldn’t something more original and clever be thought of after all this time? If you are going to spend the time and effort to make a sequel to a movie that so many people love, couldn’t a little more care have been taken with the characters? Did they have no idea what made their early films so successful and beloved by fans or do the Farrelly Brothers even care anymore? Was this sequel just a payday and nothing more? It certainly seems so and that is a bit sad.