Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Tom Shadyac’s 1994 film sets a Miami detective who takes only missing animal cases on the theft of a football team’s mascot, days before the Super Bowl. The mystery is built fairly, the amber stone from the tank and the 1984 championship ring reaching you in time. But the film spends its eighty six minutes on Jim Carrey’s face and body, not on deduction, so the investigation mostly joins one bit to the next. The ending needs a warning: the reveal is the solution itself, not a stray line that dates badly, and Carrey said he wanted his reaction to kissing a man to be the biggest, most obnoxious homophobic reaction ever recorded. Rick Moranis was offered the part and turned it down; Judd Nelson and Alan Rickman were considered, and producers weighed rewriting Ace as a woman for Whoopi Goldberg. Carrey then helped rewrite the script and was allowed to improvise on set. Jack Bernstein’s earlier draft ran far darker: heads torn off by a tow hook, a nightmare in which Ace is shredded by pigeons. Shadyac’s first feature was made for fifteen million dollars. A good fit if you accept a detective plot built to hand one performer his next entrance. Not for anyone who needs the ending’s transphobia to be separable from the film.