Twenty years can feel like a blip when you’re operating with a brain that’s, well, a few clowns shy of a circus. And so things don’t seem to have changed all that much for Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas—two lifelong best buds who (between the two of them) have the equivalent noggin-power of a 10-year-old boy given over to the hilarity of, say, kicking dogs.
There is one little bump that built up in their regular routine of goofy “gotcha” pranks and fart gags, though: Harry, it seems, needs a new kidney. Problem is, he doesn’t have any blood relatives that he knows of to help him out. His parents adopted him and he’s got no siblings. And he’s pretty sure he needs a, what’d they call it … yeah, a “genital donor match.”
With Lloyd’s help, however, Harry finally stumbles upon a piece of good news. An old postcard reveals that some 20 years ago a random fling named Fraida gave birth to Harry’s daughter and put her up for adoption. After seeing a picture of Penny, the rather gorgeous-looking 20-year-old, Lloyd is chomping at the bit to go seek her out. (For, ahem, Harry’s sake. You know … kidney-wise.)
Harry isn’t so sure, though. I mean he’s been a deadbeat dad all these years, and he didn’t even know it! Think of all those birthdays, holidays and graduations he’s missed! The presents he’d have to come up with! No. There’s no way he’d ever be able to convince that girl to give him a kidney.
But Lloyd assures his good buddy that he’s got nothin’ to worry ’bout. Why, Penny’ll be the pretty heads to his ugly tails, you’ll see! Besides, how could she resist the considerable charms of her old dad’s incredibly handsome and dandily desirable best friend?
Lloyd and Harry are … good friends?
That’s about all I’ve got to say here ‘cepting that Harry takes a bullet for his daughter at one point. That’s positive, right?
Lloyd has an ongoing fantasy about having sex with Penny. He imagines himself seducing the girl, ripping open her clothes … and then he wakes up to find himself licking and fondling the metal grill of a semi-truck. We see Penny wearing skimpy underwear and figure-emphasizing clothes throughout the film.
Fraida, meanwhile, is called a “titanic whore,” and it’s made clear that she had sexual encounters with nearly everyone the boys knew in their youth. In the present day, she wears cleavage-boosting tops, and we see her walk out of a janitor’s closet having apparently just had intercourse with Penny’s adopted dad, Dr. Pinchelow. When Lloyd remembers a younger version of Fraida, the camera leers at her curves. He and she get ready to have a sexual encounter in the back of a van.
An elderly woman tricks Lloyd into reaching under her bedcovers and sexually stimulating her. Penny’s adopted mom, Adele, kisses the household handyman and seductively sucks on his toes. Harry imagines himself with a super-curvy wife who wears a clingy dress. He “bounces” her backside with the palm of his hand. Lloyd imagines Harry married to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo matriarch Mama June, and he walks up and squeezes the heavyset woman’s breasts. We see another woman’s braless breasts through the sheer fabric of her blouse.
The camera spots a bikini poster of Bo Derek and a cabaret ad that showcases an unknown bikini model. Gay sex and incest jokes pepper the dialogue. A bestial gag involves a teenage Harry “tricking” a dog into giving him oral sex.
A man and the vehicle he’s standing next to are crushed and swept away by a fast-moving locomotive. Assassins throw knives into a man’s chest. One of them is then killed with knives and a silver tray that are thrown at his head. Someone is shot in the shoulder. One guy has his testicles ripped off with a whip. (The whip is drawn back to show the dangling body part.) Another has his catheter and (clothed) private parts forcibly yanked by three men. Lloyd and Harry thump each other in (where else?) the crotch.
A little girl is purposely hit in the face with a bedroom door, which knocks out her tooth. A man’s room is blown up with fireworks and gunpowder—and he comes bursting out on fire. A large firecracker blows up inside a car, rendering its occupants temporarily deaf. A gunman shoots a bird off someone’s head. The camera scans a feather- and bloody-bird-corpse-littered room after a cat has been set loose there. We see a nasty gash on a guy’s back that’s been crudely stitched together.
One f-word and a half-dozen s-words. There’s a use or two each of “b–ch,” “a–,” “h—” and “b–tard.” God’s and Jesus’ names are together misused close to 10 times. God’s is combined with “d–n” on several occasions. Various crude and lewd references are made to male and female body parts.
Harry’s roommate is a drug dealer who cooks and sells meth. Harry’s cat samples the stuff and ends up swinging from a light fixture. In an imagined scene, a baby holds a bottle of booze. Lloyd and Penny have margaritas at a restaurant. Harry drinks wine, and He and Lloyd have a couple of beers. Lloyd talks of his mother drinking and smoking while pregnant with him. He and Harry drink embalming fluid. Adele spikes her husband’s food with a slow-acting poison.
The film is rife with rapid-fire gags that really do try to make audiences gag on urine, defecation, fart games, defamation of the dead, racial slurs and talk of obstructing menstrual bleeding.
If someone’s eye-watering reaction to a wedgie got you chuckling in the last movie, well, then why not rip off a guy’s testicles this go-round? That’s been the Farrelly brothers’ mode for lo these many years as they’ve spent decades perfecting the un-art of low comedy.
That means the low-bar standard of inane and fart-focused giggles that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels delivered some 20 years ago has long since been eclipsed. Did the incredibly doltish Harry and Lloyd come off as somewhat appealing (tolerable?) in the original Dumb and Dumber because they were, um, dumb and dumber innocents—mentally stunted but high-energy zanies who kept bouncing up against the average-feeling world around them in rude and unexpected ways? Well, then in this far-off sequel, everything and everyone is as frantic and rabid as the protagonist dum-dums themselves. And those two have gone from being absurdly crude because they lack a good portion of gray matter to being mean and lewd from a lack of, well, basic human decency.
Purposefully hurtful gotchas, vulgar sexual smirks that go so far as bestiality, racist grime and, yes, even the aforementioned testicle tear-away leave this pic smelling of something far worse than “merely” another gaseous whoosh.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
