Me, Myself & Irene (R, 2000)

After years of internalizing his frustrations, state trooper Charlie (Jim Carrey) has developed an alter ego: Hank, a police officer who is abusive and violent, and Charlie struggles to keep Hank under control. Assigned to escort Irene (Renee Zellweger) to New York for questioning, Charlie and Hank compete over her -- for very different reasons.

Purveyors of crass gags and toilet humor have no trouble attracting moviegoers, especially when Jim Carrey's delivering the laughs. But co-directors and writers Bobby and Peter Farrelly suggest with their follow-up to the successful There's Something About Mary that they may well have hit a brick wall. Mary offered likable oddball characters and even a bit of dramatic tension amidst its outrageous laughs. In comparison, ME, MYSELF & IRENE resembles an Airplane-like parody of a Farrelly brothers movie. Rather than veer from their established romantic comedy formula, they've recycled elements of their own earlier movies -- most notably Dumb and Dumber, which also starred Carrey -- and turn the vulgarity and the political incorrectness up to damaging proportions. Carrey gives the elastic performance one expects from him, but seeing him hold a little girl's head underwater and squat, pants down, on a neighbor's lawn, elicits far more groans than laughs.

The production looks like it was made several years ago, then improperly stored until a willing distributor could be found. Amidst the washed-out cinematography, the bodily waste humor, and the free-flowing obscenity, Renée Zellweger -- who ably starred alongside Meryl Streep and William Hurt in One True Thing -- is sadly out of place. A 17-year-old Steve Martin fan who saw similarities in this movie to The Jerk and All of Me found it unnecessarily crude and mean-spirited, but got her money's worth of laughs out of it. See at your own risk.