Pet Detective Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey), who located the dolphin mascot of the Miami football team in his last adventure, is now in search of an albino bat, mascot of a primitive African tribe. The stakes are high if the bat is not found, war will erupt.

Ace travels to Africa straight from his new home in Tibet, where he has achieved enlightenment as a Buddhist monk and lives in a mountain monastery. In the uncivilized jungle, Ace will face temptation and danger while struggling to remain true to his new faith.

Carrey is facing a wave of negative reviews for this movie, and I guess it makes sense; not because his comedy is any worse than 95 percent of the film humor out there (think about recent comedy releases before you argue), but because he is so outrageous he stands out as an easy target for criticism.

Advertisement

Carrey is the craziest physical comedian I have ever seen, barring none. Jerry Lewis came close, but Lewis’ films were heavily limited by the restrictive morality of his era. Here Carrey gets a free reign and runs with it, producing some of the most tasteless sight gags ever filmed. But for someone with so much in-your-face talent, he may also flop more than any famous comedian in history.

There are moments in When Nature Calls that are close to genius; once, in reaction to a rich woman’s fox muff, Ace knocks her husband unconscious and cavorts through a cocktail party with the wizened old geezer draped over his shoulders, caressing and flourishing his human garment in the same manner the woman had displayed the animal pelt. Other gags that work include an African tribe whose formal greeting is face-spitting, and Carrey out-wrestling an alligator while asking it that favorite childhood question, Why are you hitting yourself? as he slaps the hapless reptile with its own feet.

But much of the humor is so infantile and obvious that one has to wonder if Carrey didn’t come up with a few good jokes, improvising the rest as he went along, counting on his rubber face and unique caricatures to get him through. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, and by the 20th time Carrey twitches like a maniac and says allllllrighty then, the film starts to seem a lot longer than it really is.

When Nature Calls gets four out of ten stars. If you liked Ace Ventura in his first movie, you probably won’t be disappointed by the sequel. Everything here is Ace times two; the hair, the case and the locations are all expansions of themes Carrey introduced in the first Pet Detective story.