Cable Guy

One of the first things one learns in movie review school is objectivity. Certain specialized exercises and meditation techniques are taught the reviewer which allows him, despite marketing campaigns of such intensity that even babies still in utero know that The Rock rocks, to enter each movie as a blank slate, to take the film on its own merits.

All my training was for naught, however, as I prepared to see this weekend's heavyweight release, The Cable Guy. The problem was that I've never really liked Jim Carrey. Though he was amusing, and even somewhat charming in the low-budget Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, he has since become the Sylvester Stallone of laughs -- an overpaid buffoon who's tiresome shtick epitomizes everything that is wrong with Hollywood comedy.

It was with dread in my heart then that I entered the theater and took my seat. The lights went down and something wonderful happened. I was surprised. To be surprised by a blockbuster summer release is a rare event, but to be surprised by a summer movie starring Jim Carrey nearly stopped my heart. Mind you, it wasn't an entirely pleasant surprise, but it was better than nothing.

The Cable Guy, in case you've recently emerged from a coma, is the story of the high price one man pays for free cable.

The man, in this case, is Steven Kovacs (played by Matthew Broderick) a young professional who's girlfriend has recently ejected him from their house for asking her to marry him.

The high price Steven is forced to pay is being around Jim Carrey, a price whose steepness viewers will come to understand all too well before The Cable Guy is through.

And the surprise...the surprise is that The Cable Guy is not a Jim Carrey movie. While Carrey's earlier cinematic ventures -- the Ace Venturas and Dumb and Dumber -- existed only for Carrey's pliant features and spasmodic talent, The Cable Guy is a movie into which he barely fits. And which would have benefited greatly by his absence.

At its mutated heart The Cable Guy is a black comedy about the unlikeliest of Hollywood subjects -- alienation, loneliness, male friendship, love and a country enslaved by the soothing cathode glow of television. Somehow this movie, which sounds like the kind of great low-budget indie film that would wow them at Sundance, found itself starring Jim Carrey and bellying up to the summer movie bar like a 300 pound Hells Angel.

The Jekyll and Hydean conflict between The Cable Guy's two personalities isn't terribly well concealed by director Ben Stiller. For the most part the style of the movie is dark, angular, gothic -- at times even brooding. This must have come as quite a surprise to studio executives. One can almost see them watching the dailies, scratching their pointy heads and muttering, "Wha...when does Jim get to do his shtick? When does he squirm all over the screen and make those goofy faces the kids love so much?"

Four scenes in The Cable Guy answer those questions -- a basketball game, a medieval battle, a karaoke party and a fight in a bathroom. Brightly lit, kinetic, quick-cut these sequences are in the movie solely to let Jim Carrey stretch out, get in a little shtick time. Their contrast with the rest of the film is painfully obvious and they give The Cable Guy a decidedly unwholesome, hybridized nature.

But the disruptiveness of Carrey's presence goes well beyond these few scenes. The pacing and tone of The Cable Guy veer wildly, yanking the audience through its changing moods like a manic-depressive girlfriend. And, because the rest of the characters in The Cable Guy bear a relatively close resemblance to real people, Carrey's cartoonish behavior makes it feel as though he somehow wandered onto the wrong set.

Matthew Broderick, usually a quick comic actor seems unsure of how to handle Carrey. What may have been a decent performance in a more cohesive movie appears little more than perfunctory in The Cable Guy. In dealing with Carrey, anything but ranting and writhing feels somehow insincere.

Judging from the relatively mirthless audience, the outlook for the Frankenstein's monster of The Cable Guy doesn't look good. For Jim Carrey fanciers it suffers from a decided lack of Carreyisms, for the rest of us it suffers from too many. And so, neither wacky nor witty, The Cable Guy proves to be an expensive way to get out of the heat for two hours.

I wonder what's on TV this weekend?

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