OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: Off the mark, but still embarassingly funny.

Details: Starring Jim Carrey and Renée Zellweger. Rated R for sexual content, crude humor, strong profanity and some violence. 2 hours.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: The embarrassingly funny gross-out jokes in "Me, Myself & Irene" are bigger than those in "Dumb & Dumber," the visual punch lines held onscreen even a bit longer than those in "There's Something About Mary." It's just that Jim Carrey's new rank comedy is nowhere near as well-cut as last year's "South Park" movie.

Those impish filmmaking Farrelly siblings, Bobby and Peter, have solidified themselves as the Marx Brothers of shameless shenanigans, their deliciously disgusting bathroom wit spawning a legion of less adept imitations such as "American Pie" and "Road Trip." With "Me, Myself & Irene," they prove yet again that, no matter how foul and nasty their humor, they understand very clearly how to set up the joke and when to fire the over-the-top punch.

It's a movie that will make you laugh. Just don't try to explain it to your mother.

It's too bad, then, that "Me, Myself & Irene" is clueless when it comes to constructing a plot with which to thread the powerful jokes.

Carrey plays a Rhode Island highway patrol officer who, after a devastating marital breakup, develops a split personality. At times he's either mild-mannered Charlie or wild-mannered Hank. Enter Renée Zellweger, Carrey's real-life squeeze, as Irene, a sort of on-the-lam chick somehow caught up in bad dealings at a golf resort. (Sadly, no matter how many times it tries - and it tries plenty - the film is incapable of making her dilemma crystal clear.)

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill is complaining about how the movie pokes fun at multiple-personality disorders. They'll just have to get in line, because "Me, Myself & Irene" makes fun of just about everyone and everything: albinos, lesbians, mothers, cows and, ahem, the vertically challenged.

You thought "Austin Powers' " Mini-Me was a scream? Well, Mini-Me, schmini-me.

Carrey's movie has a nunchaku-twirling dynamo in Tony Cox, the film's small but big-brained limo driver who's Charlie's first nemesis. Michael Bowman (a movie newcomer who landed his role by answering an ad on a Web site) also fares well as Whitey, the albino whom Charlie/Hank and Irene team up with on their adventure.

Carrey, however, seems to be ever so slightly off his mark. His Charlie is less fluid than one would expect, his Hank a little more reserved than one might hope. The obvious problem is the script. The plot is a washout, and the movie's cuts (whole story segments seem to have been lopped off) keep his dual personalities, both angling for Irene, from really clicking.

But many of the stand-alone jokes do work. And some are jaw-dropping gems.

Just be smart and don't take your mother.

— Bob Longino, Cox News Service