Not much about Mary

Much has been written and said these last few days about whether this new comedy from the makers of Dumb and Dumber is insulting to disabled people.

For the record, it is - and that's the least of its problems.

More insulting yet is directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly's apparent contempt for any of the conventions of comedy - conventions which in surer hands might actually have conspired to make it funny.

The premise here - itself tasteless - is that the eponymous Mary (Cameron Diaz) attracts stalkers as other people attract junk mail.

Thus she is pursued around Florida, where she lives with her mentally handicapped brother, by an assortment of men who make Danny DeVito seem like Cary Grant.

The track record of the Farrelly brothers being as it is (in Dumb and Dumber, for instance, a blind boy discovers his parakeet's head is stuck on with Sellotape) we should not be too surprised at the occasional excess.

But where Dumb and Dumber was silly and infectious, this new work is merely gross.

The "something" in question about Mary seems to be that she's a complete idiot, since the rest of us can see from the back of the stalls the transparent phoniness of the stalkers for whom she successively falls.

Her one pursuant with genuine motives is Ted Stroehmann (TV comedian Ben Stiller), but he blows his chances of taking her to the school prom when he gets his genitals caught in his zip - a plot device which is right up there with Porky's II.

Ted loses touch with Mary, and so, 12 years later, hires private eye Pat Healy (Matt Dillon) to track her down. Healy, however, also has designs on Mary - as does a woefully miscast Lee Evans as a clumsy and disabled college professor. Meanwhile, Ted's friend Dom (Chris Elliot) harbours feelings of his own.

The dialogue is both risible and repetitive.

Dom: "Ted, I'm dying."

Ted: "Really?"

Dom: "No, I'm just kidding."

Apparently, the intended audience might not have grasped the subtlety of that exchange, so a few minutes later, Mary ventures: "Ted, I'm bisexual."

Ted: "Really?"

Mary: "No, I'm just kidding."

The staging of the centrepiece gags, one of which involves resuscitating an apparently dead dog, is pedestrian and basic. Nevertheless, these set pieces have made There's Something About Mary much talked about, especially in America.

And clearly, there is a certain appeal here for adolescents and the otherwise easily-pleased.

For the rest of us, however, the film offers roughly the same entertainment value as accidentally sitting on a whoopee cushion.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.