Well I wouldn’t bother writing about this except that I made a point to write a post about EVERY movie I watched this year that I hadn’t seen before. So, here goes.
This movie was stupid, mean-spirited, thoughtless and lazy. And that coming from a fan of the original.
It started out promising. The idea of Lloyd faking a coma for 20 years just to say ‘gotcha!’ to Harry is pretty funny, and I probably would have laughed a lot if it hadn’t been given away in the trailer. The jokes after that are low hanging, predictable and mean. And when the jokes weren’t mean or gross, I felt like i was being mocked. Everything else was a cheap callback, stealing any positive feelings fans might have had for the original, instead of coming up with their own jokes. Much of the main plotline made no sense, many of the jokes were impossible to have occurred in real life, (like, physically impossible) And Jim Carry’s face has never been more punchable.
Just to make sure this wasn’t me having a case of the olds, I rewatched the original right after watching this horrible sequel.
Even 20 years later, when I’m an adult and rarely watch comedies, I found the first one to be charming, heartfelt and funny. Yes it’s stupid. Yes the characters might as well be mentally handicapped. But they have motivations and you can almost believe they might be real people, instead of walking gross-out punchlines that could never exist in the real world. Incompetence is real, and the original movie is actually internally consistent. The characters don’t appear places without having to get there, or disappear for a few scenes then reappear saying they’ve been to Mexico, like bugs bunny popping up out of his hole.
The people in the sequel could never have been real people. They have no redeeming factors, skills or anything positive about them. Even their friendship seems false most of the time. In the original, Harry and Lloyd are dumb, yes, but even they show some skills. Lloyd tricks Sea-bass into a free meal, and Harry is actually charming enough to get Mary to go out with him a second time. In the sequel, Penny has to be (and is) portrayed as an imbecile in order to show even a brief interest in either of these characters.
I also got the impression that the Jeff Daniels must have been forced into doing this movie somehow, because he didn’t seem to be trying, and often it felt like he was making fun of me for even watching.
The whole movie just felt thin, hostile, and cheap.
Not recommended. Just watch the original again if you want that nostalgia.
Jonas David 