Warner Bros. has a commercial ace up its sleeve with “Ace Ventura: When Description Calls.” The unusual outing is as fresh, brash and outrageous as the archetype and should easily beat the first outing’s $ 100 million worldwide box office gross from the domestic market alone.
As the saying goes, “Aces go places,” and Jim Carrey’s intrepid animal investigator is on the scent in Africa following a Himalayan hiatus. Obviously, his fame has grown even if his taste in clothing and hairstyles remains hopelessly anachronistic.
On assignment to retrieve a raccoon improbably abandoned on an Everest-like slope, Ace Ventura is bowed and shaken when the critter, in a sly homage to “Cliffhanger” with a dollop of “Rambo III” thrown in, falls to its death following a spectacular rescue. Ace responds by retreating to a Tibetan monastery to seek inner peace.
But just short of nirvana, Fulton Greenwall (Ian McNiece), a pudgy British emissary, arrives with the entreaty to recover a purloined, sacred beast that stands between harmony and bloodshed among tribes of a small African nation.
Only later does he learn that the creature’s a white bat, and Ace just happens to be chiropterphobic. All rightee!
Plot is the least of concerns in the sequel. It’s your basic boy gets bat, boy loses bat, boy gets bat back yarn, an opportunity to take this unlikely screen hero into satire, spoof, utter juvenilia, total tastelessness and, believe it or not, social commentary. It’s a death-defying hodgepodge anchored by the complete confidence of star Carrey.
Nor can one discount the better-than-yeoman-like work of screenwriter-turned-director Steve Oedekerk. He has a symbiotic sense of his star’s anarchism and an innate feel for just how long to milk a laugh and keep the action and scenery balanced and bright.
The ongoing appeal of the Ace persona remains his complete defiance of polite society. What makes him stand out (apart from the physically obvious) is that this rebel truly has a cause — animal rights. Though it rarely wears its message on its sleeve — and only once sports it around its neck — the sentiment imbues almost every frame of the picture.
The inflated airs of British colonials prove an easy target. Simon Callow, as the cinematically named Vincent Cadby, is a famil-iarly pompous English consul, ripe for comic picking. The much greater challenge is making sport of the natives in the current p.c. climate. Despite presenting an image of Africa straight out of Tarzan, this “Ace” deftly pokes fun at the stereotype and not the individuals.
Carrey is in excellent form, with razorlike observation and a pliant physicality that continues to defy the tenets of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Though his manner echoes past clowns as diverse as Keaton and Jerry Lewis, no one has ventured out on the thin limb of taste to this extent without breaking a bough. Just watching the material work is scarier than anything in a David Cronenberg movie.
Supporting players nicely complement the antics. There’s also a seamless quality to this around-the-world kook’s tour that subs the Canadian Rockies and a South Carolina animal refuge, respectively, for the remote and raw Himalayan and African locales.