Jim Carrey excels in this comedy, Me Myself & Irene,
a film I didn't think I'd like half as much as I did given the lame duck that
was
Kingpin
and I haven't yet seen two of their other biggest successes to date,
Dumb & Dumber and There's Something About Mary.
He's the only one who could take on the lead role as Rhode Island Police Officer
Charlie Baileygates, a man who took the knocks of life the hard way eighteen
years ago by never dealing with his problems, which began when his then new
wife Layla (Traylor Howard) ran off with the black dwarf Limo Driver
(Tony Cox) and left him with their children - three black triplets...
He meets Irene (Renee Zellweger) when having to take her back to her
own neck of the woods for what seems like a standard duty, but there's sinister
measures afoot at the hands of the man she works for who's in with the bad
seeds and taking in a number of corrupt cops with him. When push comes to shove -
though - and needs must when the devil drives, Charlie's rage manifests in its
only way out - by turning him into his split personality, Hank Evans...
and it doesn't help when they go on the run and he leaves his tablets behind...
There are some shocks and surprises, not because of the alleged racism or
sizism, but at comedic moments such as when "Hank" gets his own back on his
neighbour whose wife continually steals his newspaper for some lavatorial
reading and, when out and about, he takes the place of a young mom's newborn
child...
As Hank, Charlie often felt a right tit.
I can't fault the picture nor sound. Presented in the original 1.85:1 widescreen
ratio and anamorphic, artifacts are non-existant, the picture is pin-sharp
with bold, bright colours.
The average bitrate is 5.5Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 8Mb/s towards the
last hour of the film.
The soundtrack is in Dolby Digital 5.1 and won't give your system a workout
but there are a few nice split-surround effects and music in the form of
the Foo Fighters' Breakout and Smash Mouth performing an
excellent cover of Steely Dan's Do It Again.
The UK Foot and Mouth disease spread further than first thought.
First up for extras is some 4:3 material with 3 TV Spots and 2
Trailers. The 10 Deleted Scenes extend quite a few of them with the
new footage in colour and the kept-in parts faded to black and white.
The 6-minute Featurette is a brief combination of the usual film clips
and cast/crew interview soundbites and there are six Behind the Scenes
pieces of footage lasting 4-5 minutes apiece that are more like the B-Roll
footage you see on Entertainment in Video DVDs. An extensive
Production Gallery is also included.
I'm becoming an increasing fan of the Foo Fighters as their music is
played to death on MTV2 (Sky channel 446) and their Breakout video is
here as is a feature-length Directors' Commentary from the Farrelly
brothers.
The only low point is the number of chapters - 14 - which isn't enough.
Dialogue is in English only, but subtitles are provided in 11 languages:
English, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian,
Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. The menus have some not-so-subtle animation
inbetween them combined with suitable sound effects.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
