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I was refreshing the IMDb Bottom 100, waiting for Disney’s “Snow White” to appear, and ended up scanning through a bunch of movies I still hadn’t seen—turns out, that was more than half of the list. So I started adding them to my media server, preparing for the inevitable plunge into cinematic garbage.
The first movie I watched was “The Starving Games”, which currently holds the prestigious spot at number 54. After that, I watched “Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd”, sitting comfortably at number 58. For some reason, though, it didn’t strike me as that bad.
Maybe it was the low expectations, given the infamous reputation this movie holds. The reviews are brutal, the audience rating isn’t worth mentioning. The DVD cover, with their faces pressed up against a glass wall, is genuinely off-putting. There was really no reason for me to watch this movie when it came out in 2003, and I didn’t—until now. And, possibly because I had so little hope for it, I ended up liking it more than I expected.
In 1986, Harry Dunne gets his chance to attend regular high school, where he crosses paths with Lloyd Christmas, a troubled teen who has been bounced between foster homes until being adopted by the school janitor, Ray. The two quickly form an inseparable bond and get caught up in a scheme orchestrated by the corrupt Principal Collins. After seeing Harry and Lloyd stuck on a flagpole, Collins creates a fake “special needs” class to scam $100,000 from a former student. The duo unknowingly recruits a variety of eccentric students, including the school bully Turk, a confused centaur mascot, and a Chinese exchange student. Meanwhile, Harry and Lloyd clash over Jessica Matthews, a reporter for the school paper, leading to a falling out.
I’m not going to pretend this is some hidden masterpiece that everyone just fails to understand but me. It’s a less-than-mediocre movie, and it has the same vibe as all those “American Pie Presents” sequels that went straight to DVD after “American Wedding“. I think that’s where this movie runs into trouble. Since it got a theatrical release, it’s held to a higher standard than those straight-to-video films. But “Dumb and Dumberer” never feels like a movie meant for cinemas. It feels like a cheap prequel to a film that was a box office hit a decade ago.
There’s no one from the original movie involved, and the cast is made up of a bunch of unknown actors, including a young Shia LaBeouf. Most of the movie is set in cheap locations, like a school or houses, with very little happening in terms of cinematography. Everything is shot like your average sitcom. The lead roles feel more like cosplay or an SNL sketch impersonating Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels from the first movie, though Eric Christian Olsen’s Lloyd is a surprisingly spot-on imitation.
What could’ve helped is an R-rating. Since the movie already feels like a straight-to-video production, why not go all out? There are two scenes—one set in a girls’ locker room, the other in a fantasy from Lloyd featuring dozens of women in bikinis—that might as well have included some gratuitous nudity.
There are a few decent jokes and the obligatory callbacks to the original “Dumb and Dumber”, but it’s a far cry from the original, which had so many little memorable moments. However, if you approach this as an 80-minute straight-to-video release, it’s just fine, I guess. I had a few chuckles, and the tiny bit of plot it has is serviceable at best. But does this movie really belong alongside films like “Troll 2” and “Manos: The Hands of Fate?” No, it’s not that kind of experience. “Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd” is just the result of a studio trying to make a quick buck off a hit movie nearly a decade later.
