I have gone on record many times with my love for Jim Carrey and that Dumb & Dumber is and will always be one of my all-time favorite comedies, and it’s with those two loves that I chose to sit down during the holiday season to check out Carrey’s return to what he does best: make people laugh.
Let’s be clear about this: I love funny Jim Carrey, the Carrey from Ace Ventura, Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty and even The Cable Guy and I do love serious Jim Carrey, the Carrey from Man on the Moon, The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and even the dark Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and while I don’t think Yes Man is on par with any of his other hilarious hits, it’s still a nice return for him to comedy.
The story is quite simple in that Carrey stars as “Carl Allen,” a mostly-negative loan officer who, after attending a self-help conference that preaches to say “Yes” to all opportunities and propositions, makes a covenant with the conference guru (played pretty well by Terrence Stamp) to say “yes” to everything that comes his way. Naturally, mild hilarity and silly situations ensue as he says “yes” to everything including giving a homeless guy all of his money (which leads him to the love interest, “Allison” played awkwardly, though that’s her usual character so it’s quite charming, by Zooey Deschanel), dressing up and attending a Harry Potter party, agreeing to be sexually pleased by his very old neighbor (which was a scene that totally should have been eliminated and was only left in to attract the PG-13 boys), which are all situations that eventually lead to good and positive changes in his life.
And that’s where, to me, the film loses its stamina. It’s almost like the writers didn’t know how to create the conflict, when everything goes his way by saying “yes” to everything, how do you introduce an antagonist if you’re trying to get the message across to be open to possibilities in your life? Well, unfortunately, you only have a couple of hours to accomplish character, story, conflict, resolution, and a climax, and the writers of Yes Man chose the last 25 minutes to introduce the conflict, resolve it, and lead you to the climax of the story. The ending all felt rushed and fake and I didn’t buy the tension that was created when Carl’s (Carrey) automatic agreeing to everything lead to questions of his authenticity in relationships and if he really was being honest or not. They should have started a natural progression of semi-negative consequences from his total “yes-ness” to everything instead of causing the movie to come to sudden halt and present us with a contrived conflict.
One of the things I liked seeing in this movie was Carrey’s age lines. He’s 46 years old and for the first time that I’ve seen in his movies, the man with the rubber face is actually showing signs of aging. I say it’s about time, it was to me a very realistic sign that he can’t do what he does forever. The days of beating the crap out of himself for a laugh are now going to be limited and the toll it takes will be visible. I think you see the beginnings of it in Yes Man. The comedy here is safe, it’s nothing that Carrey is not used to doing, but it’s also not comedy that will blow you away or affect the way you view Carrey. I think this is a safe return to physical and laugh-out-loud comedy for him and maybe it’ll help people forget when he tried VERY HARD to be hardcore and be taken for a twisted-horror-movie-actor with The Number 23. Jim Carrey flat out wants to make people laugh and I think it shows in every comedy he does. His energy is there and he is pretty much always funny (even in the crappy films), I think. I don’t think he needs to ONLY do comedies (Eternal Sunshine and Man on the Moon are 2 of my all-time Carrey favorites) and I don’t think he’s lost it at all.
Content Warning: Rated PG-13 for crude sexual humor, language and brief nudity. This movie could have been a PG family-friendly film with a message if not for the awkward geriatric “sexually pleasing” scene and an ending scene with old people’s butt’s. So, obviously, this film has a lot of geriatric nudity, I didn’t even think about that until afterwords.
For those of you that didn’t know, Jonah Hex, DC Comic’s western comic anti-hero, is getting made into a movie. The character of Hex, known for having the right side of his face disfigured and wearing a Confederate army uniform, was a rough-and-tumble gunslinger and part-time bounty hunter whose adventures always ended in blood.
