Me, Myself & Irene

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.