Somebody Stop Him

As I noted in my review of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (which is a very funny movie right up to the point where it becomes a horrifically offensive movie), Jim Carrey’s breakout films introduces his manic, go-for-broke, over-the-top comedic style, which turned him into an instant star. This was a good and bad thing for the actor. On the one hand, it did make him a star. At the same time, there was a stretch of years there where the only thing studios wanted from the actor were those manic performances. Carrey had desires to be more than the one-note, cartoonish joke machine, but it was hard to get those roles when he was already slotted into the manic weirdo performance.

Case in point: The Mask. Based on the Dark Horse Comics series, the original treatments for the film played to that comic’s darker tone. But over time, as studios sniffed around the property, the producers decided that the violent, gory tone of the script wouldn’t work as a film. Instead, they opted to rewrite and turn the film into a whimsical, comedic, family-friendly property. At that point, they just needed a star, and turned to Jim Carrey as he had already proven himself capable of playing a living cartoon. He was their ideal, and the offer was sent once the actor had read the script.

Could Carrey have played the darker version of the role? Absolutely I think he could have. He has proven himself to be a capable actor in many other films, including The Truman Show, and he has shown he can go dark, like in Kick-Ass 2, when it’s called for. But I also think the studio heads at the time were at least a little right. While darker superhero takes could work in theaters (Blade proved that only a couple of years later), it would have been hard to find an actor that could play both comedic and violent at the same time, and who would have been willing to do so. Jim Carrey, just coming off of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, likely wouldn’t have wanted to take such a dark turn so quickly and alienate the fans he’d just garnered. A darker version of The Mask would have likely featured someone else, and it’s questionable if it would have been nearly as good.

With all that being said, in its current form, The Mask is a silly but enjoyable bit of superhero fluff. When it came out in the Summer of 1994, the film became a massive hit. It grossed $351.6 Mil against an absolutely tiny (by comparison) budget of only $23 Mil. Carrey’s star had already been on the rise, and people wanted more of him. The film came out at the right time in his career, and just at the start of what eventually became the superhero boom, capitalizing on all of that to be one of the biggest superhero hits up to that point. And it’s also a silly good time.

Carrey stars as Stanley Ipkiss, a put-upon guy that simply can’t catch a break. While he has a decent job at the central city bank, his boss (the bank manager’s son) hates him. His landlady makes his home life a living hell. He has one friend, Charlie Schumaker (Richard Jeni), but even he barely pays attention to Stanley whenever something better comes along. And Stanley simply has no luck with women. The only thing good in his life is his dog, Milo (played by animal performer Max), who can be a handful even at the best of times.

Things change, though, when Stanley finds a weird mask floating in the river. He takes it home and ignores it for a bit, but there’s a pull to the mask he can’t ignore. When he puts it on, the mask transforms him into a larger-than-life, cartoonish version of himself. He gains super powers, becomes nigh invulnerable, and can bend the laws of reality around him. He immediately uses the mask to help change his life around, fighting back against those that wronged him, stealing money from the bank he worked at to upgrade his life, and even catching the eye of a woman he likes, Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz), a performer at a local swing club. His exploits don’t go unnoticed, though, and Stanley gets the attention not only of the cops, led by Lieutenant Mitch Kellaway (Peter Riegert), but also gangster Dorian Tyrell (Peter Greene), who wants the power of the mask for himself. If Stanley isn’t careful, he could end up in a world of trouble.

At its core, the story of The Mask really isn’t all that deep. It’s about a man who can’t get anything right in his life and needs to make a big change to set things right and find his true self. In various other films this change would come from some action the man would take, like quitting his job, taking a wrong turn in a town, or picking up ballroom dancing. In this film it comes from an outside factor that then brings out his internal self: a mask, powered by the magic of the Norse god Loki, and this in turn causes Stanley to find who he truly wants to be.

You could argue it’s a kind of hero’s journey, with Stanley finding the mask, going on an adventure, and then deciding (spoilers for a thirty-plus year old movie) to then return the mask where he found it after he gets everything he wanted. The structure works for a reason, and it’s why so many stories follow that path. I wouldn’t call it very deep, and it’s obvious at the outset what Stanley will do and how he’s going to change his life, but it does work as a loose framework for the film to hang all of Carrey’s antics.

Jim Carrey really is who we’re here to see, and thankfully he throws himself fully into the role. While he’s good playing Stanley, a far more straight-laced role than one might expect from Carrey at the time (although, shades of The Truman Show later, of course), it’s when the mask goes on that people get what they came to see: Carrey in full, live-action, cartoon mode. And it is fantastic. With the help of some CGI at times, Carrey bounces and mugs and performs, going as hard and wacky as he can to sell his identity as the Mask. When Carrey has the mask on, he steals every scene, dominates every moment. It’s like in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: when Carrey is playing the Mask, no one else around him even really matters.

With that said, Carrey isn’t in full performance mode all the time, and we do get some decent side players that can stand up to Carrey’s quieter Ipkiss. Richard Jeni does well as Stanley’s sleazy friend, and you do love seeing the movie gently chide him whenever he gets too scummy. He doesn’t ham it up, and the performance works well. Peter Greene’s performance is more scenery-chewing as Dorian Tyrell, which actually works in context. He’s the heavy, and you want someone over-the-top that the mask could be attracted to if it ever fell out of Stanley’s hands. It works well, and I like how the film sets up its characters that could become alternate Masks.

If I’m being honest, I don’t think Cameron Diaz does as well in this film even though she’s supposed to be the female love interest. I don’t buy the chemistry (really, lack there of) between her and Carrey, and while the film doesn’t give her much to work with, she often seems lost in the role. This was one of her earliest movies, so she hadn’t quite found her place as the femme fatale that was also weirdly goofy (all thanks to There’s Something About Mary), but you really end up wishing some other actress had been given the role so she could do something more with the character.

Still, deep down we’re really just here to see Jim Carrey, and that’s what the film delivers. It takes half an hour to get there, mind you, so the film can set up its plot and put the mask in Stanley’s hands, but once it goes active, it really goes hard. From the Mask bouncing around like a cartoon, to the big “Cuban Pete” musical number, and all the scenes scattered around it, The Mask gives us all that we wanted: Jim Carrey doing the Jim Carrey thing, and in the context of the film it really worked.

And then all that good will was squandered later on a terrible, unrelated sequel, The Son of the Mask, that absolutely no one liked when it came out in 2005. And the franchise has basically been dead ever since.