There's something about seeing a slob at a tremendously rich party who just doesn't care about the etiquette of the rich people. I first saw this movie when I was in high school, and I remember that I would ditch school and go to the theater to see it and I would laugh hysterically until my sides hurt every time I saw it. Sure, Ace Ventura does not compare to half of these movies, and is clearly more on the side of the bone-headed comedy that he was doing on In Living Color, but his talent is unmistakable. The Mask (hey, he's still new, give the guy a break), Dumb & Dumber, a sequel to Ace Ventura, Liar Liar, The Cable Guy (oops), The Truman Show (ah, better), Man On The Moon, Me, Myself & Irene, The Grinch, and there's no end in sight. He had a few small roles in films previous to Ace Ventura, the largest of which was probably his role as one of the aliens in the awful film Earth Girls Are Easy, but after Ace Ventura, his career skyrocketed. A quick look through Carrey's filmography will prove that Ace Ventura is the film that really acted as a springboard for his career. But the internet was not a thing in 1994, at least not as we know it now (it would have made it way easier for Ace to solve the case), and people just didn’t have the same platform as we do now to call out problematic stuff.Ace Ventura is the kind of comedy that stems directly from a TV show, and in this case, that show was probably In Living Color, where Carrey got most of his publicity before he became famous as a movie actor. There were protests at the time, as we can see from this archived 1994 piece from the LA Times with letters decrying the film’s homophobia. The conflation of gay men with drag queens and men who lived as women or transwomen was all over the map, and we can see it here in the fact that Ace, like a lot of movies, is both homophobic and transphobic because it doesn’t know the difference.Īnd while the problematic elements of Ace Ventura are enough to give us major pause now, that film, and others, still became major hits, even with the offensiveness. There are so many examples of characters who evidence this “trend” in the 90s-from Buffalo Bill in the Silence of the Lambs, to Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, to whatever was going on with Chandler’s father, Charles, a character who was written as a gay man played by a cis woman (Kathleen Turner) on Friends.
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