Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
He's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The Ace is on the case to find the Miami Dolphins' missing mascot and quarterback Dan Marino. He goes eyeball to eyeball with a man-eating shark, stakes out the Miami Dolphins and woos and wows the ladies. Whether he's undercover, under fire or underwater, he always gets his man… or beast!
Ace Ventura is a landmark comedy vehicle built almost entirely around Jim Carrey's explosive, rubber-faced physicality, which earns above-average marks for Acting in the broadest sense — his committed, anarchic performance is genuinely memorable. The plot is a thin crime-comedy scaffold, functional but unremarkable, existing mainly to string together gags. Cinematography is workmanlike TV-movie style with nothing distinctive. Novelty gets a bump because Carrey's persona was genuinely singular and fresh in 1994 — the film introduced a comedy character unlike anything mainstream audiences had seen. The ending lands the mystery resolution with reasonable comic payoff, though the trans-phobic reveal has aged poorly. Overall a cult comedy classic powered by one performance rather than well-rounded filmmaking.