“Look at that! It’s exactly two seconds before I honk your nose and pull your underwear over your head.”

Justin’s rating: This abused every law of CGI, and we ate it all up

Justin’s review: Has there ever been a comedian who had such an amazing year as Jim Carrey did in 1994? He came out of relative obscurity to slug three grand slams within 12 months: Ace Ventura ($107M), The Mask ($352M) and Dumb and Dumber ($247M). That’s an incredible feat that put him on everyone’s radar and made him one of the most in-demand actors of the rest of that decade (and beyond).

I vaguely remember seeing The Mask in theaters — that’s $7 toward that box office total right there — but this hasn’t been a movie I’ve revisited at all since the ’90s. Maybe not even since 1994. If I think about this movie, it’s usually for the fact that someone took a chance on a bizarre Dark Horse comic series and that this single-handedly launched the career of Cameron Diaz.

Time for a rewatch! Ssssssmokin’!

The Mask strikes me as one of the more unique blockbusters of the ’90s, despite being forgotten about in the 2000s. For starters, it rolled the dice on a comic book superhero (of sorts) with zero public name brand recognition. Heck, I didn’t know until years later that this even came from a comic book series.

Jim Carrey plays Stanley, a downtrodden “nice guy” before the internet made this a deeply uncomfortable thing who gets the ultimate confidence booster when he slaps on an ancient mystical mask. Naturally, this turns him into a hairless green dude with a banana-yellow suit and unlimited powers to assert his will. Diaz is the femme fatale and no doubt the immediate fixation of every teen boy that year.

Looking back at this time period, it’s scary how fast Hollywood adapted to CGI way before most studios could wield it properly. The rudimentary application of computer effects actually worked well with The Mask, since Stanley was, in effect, a living cartoon anyway. The CGI didn’t have to look real; in fact, bonus points if it didn’t.

If the computer effects were a great match for the concept, Jim Carrey was a perfect fit for a rubber-faced character who’s given to every impulse. He gets to overact and slapstick as much as his heart desired, and instead of it being too much, it was the main draw.

There are many layers to The Mask’s oddity that go beyond a love letter to old Warner Bros cartoons. The setting, Edge City, has a nice constructed “otherness” that reminds me of a lot of other creative ’90s superhero burgs. It aims for adult jokes and kid jokes in the same package. And this film has the dubious honor of contributing to the brief resurgence of swing music. Remember that? Remember? It happened, people. It wasn’t a dream.

I also recall how much we quoted this movie for a year or two there. It certainly wasn’t a subtle, clever affair — The Mask was big, brash, and nothing more or less than silly physical comedy writ large. Today it’s still a good watch, dated in some ways, but pleasing in many others. Here’s to hoping it won’t be fully forgotten.

Deneb’s rating: Four cartoon wolves out of five.

Deneb’s review: You know how whenever you’re looking for something in a group of similar things which should include what you’re looking for, chances are about eighty to one that you’re not going to find it?

It’s Murphy’s Law. The bookstore has the series you’re looking for, but never the entry in it you want to buy. If you walk into an ice cream parlor with a craving for Double Fudge Brownie, guess what the one flavor is that they’re out of. It never fails.

Similarly, during the years when I was merely a casual reader of Mutant Reviewers, there were certain films that I felt certain should have been reviewed already, yet somehow weren’t. Several of those holes have since been filled, mind you, but one of the ones that has remained empty up ‘til now was the hole where The Mask should have been.

Seriously, The Mask was one of the first cult movies I ever encountered that I knew well in advance had achieved that status. It came out while I was still in elementary school, and it got quoted ad nauseum by certain classmates (or so it seems looking back on it). I could practically recite all the lines from this thing long before I saw it. As such, when I discovered this site, I could hardly believe that it wasn’t one of the movies listed here – and I had a bit of a flashback to that disbelief not too long ago when I realized that this was still the case.

Well, no more. I’m a reviewer here now, goldurnit, and I can review just about any movie I darn well please – and right now, I please to review this one. So, yeah. It’s hole-fillin’ time. The Mask, ladies and gentlemen.

The story is set in a fictional metropolis known as Edge City, a run-down, polluted sort of place, where dwelleth one Stanley Ipkiss (Jim Carrey). Stanley’s a pretty nice guy, and as such, the universe has decreed in its infinite wisdom that his life shall suck. He’s got a dead-end job at a bank, his boss yells at him, his landlady picks on him, and he can’t get a date to save his life. He’s the kind of guy who isn’t a loser, exactly, but who never seems to win – and it doesn’t look like things are going to change for him anytime soon.

Looks can be deceiving, though. After a particularly humiliating non-starter of an evening (which is honestly rather painful to watch), he happens to be in the right place at the right time, and acquires through random happenstance an old wooden mask. It’s not much in the way of compensation for the night he’s had, and he heads back home, feeling that life has flipped him the bird yet again.

Little does he know, though, that this is not just any mask. No, this is a magic mask, with ties to Norse mythology – it’s been chained up at the bottom of the harbor for who-knows-how-long, and it’s just itching to make up for lost time. The moment Stanley puts it on, he is transformed into (in his own words) a “love-crazy wild man”, a green-faced human cartoon character who can do just about anything – and what he primarily wants to do is have some fun.

Dubbed “The Mask” (for obvious reasons) by the media, Stanley’s alter-ego quickly runs afoul of both the mob and the law – the mob in the form of Dorian Tyrell (Peter Greene), a slick small-time operator who’s looking to get out from under the shadow of big-boss Niko (Orestes Matacena) by pulling a few jobs of his own. When the Mask ruins his plans, he swears vengeance on the funny-man – that is, if he can get to said funny-man before Lt. Kellaway (Peter Riegert), a cop who figures out pretty quickly that this chaos-causing clown is, in fact, Stanley Ipkiss, and who seeks to prove it.

None of this is helped in the slightest by the fact that Stanley has finally found a girl who seems interested in him – one Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz). She’s a drop-dead bombshell who is intrigued by our protagonist both in and out of the mask – and who happens to be Dorian’s girlfriend. Oh, this does not bode well.

All in all, Stanley’s life has just gotten a lot more interesting, and not (well, not entirely) in the ways he would have liked it to. Can he manage to stay out of jail and outwit Dorian before he gets his hands on the mask? Maybe – but it ain’t gonna be easy.

Before I go any further in talking about The Mask, let me just say that, for me, it is one of the defining movies of the mid-90s. If nothing else, this is the flick that officially unleashed Jim Carrey upon the world, and for good or ill it’s a little difficult to imagine the topography of ‘90s Hollywood without him.

More than that, though, the movie is one of those flicks that is so representative of the time when it was made that it actually affected the time when it was made. I’ve already mentioned the catchphrases and such, but it’s more than that – there’s just something about the film’s overall mood and mindset that seems to codify the way we thought about things back then. I’m probably not doing a good job of explaining what I mean, but basically, if you want to get a hint of what the cultural mindset of the times was, I’d say The Mask is one of a handful of films that I would recommend you watch.

Having said that, is it any good? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out, now isn’t it?

Normally, I’d talk about other things before getting around to the main character, but there’s no way to escape it – you cannot talk about The Mask without first bringing up Jim Carrey’s performance. I’m not the biggest fan of Mr. Carrey – he’s been in some pretty dumb stuff in his time – but here? Here he makes the movie.

There is a reason why The Mask made Carrey’s career, and why many consider it the definitive example of his work – the guy goes nuts in this. I’ve read more reviews than I can list that say something along the lines of  “he hardly needs the special effects”. I’m not sure I’d go that far – they get pretty good mileage out of them – but holy crap does the guy pull out all the stops for this one. The Mask is the sort of character who’s so far over the top he busts through the ceiling. Just about every line that comes out of his mouth is quote-worthy, and if I could quote the weird little noises he makes, I would (especially since you will try and imitate them after you see this movie). He’s best described as (and this is actually addressed within the film to some degree) a sort of living incarnation of Tex Avery cartoons, every single wild take ever made collected into one man.

Now, this could come off as just a tad obnoxious, and at times it does. (I could have done without that weird snorting laugh, for instance – you’ll know what I mean when you hear it.) But there’s a good reason for that. The Mask is basically Stanley’s repressed id come to life; he’s the explosion of steam when the lid is suddenly yanked off the pressure cooker. While we’re on his side because he fights the bad guys, he is not someone you’d want to be in a room with for very long – quite possibly because he might hurt you.

The guy basically has no restraints and no limits, including those which govern basic human interaction; he’s pretty much solely out to have some fun, and while he’s certainly very funny himself, there are a few bits that hint at a side to him that is just a leetle bit disturbing. The scene in the park, for instance – tell me that things might not have escalated to decidedly uncomfortable levels if they hadn’t been interrupted when they were.

For all the Mask’s weapons-grade levels of wacky, however, he isn’t the main character. That would be Stanley Ipkiss himself, who (and it is worth emphasizing this) is not the Mask. The Mask is merely a part of his inner self that’s unleashed and concentrated – it’s not him.

In fact (and this is not emphasized on, say, the box cover), the Mask’s presence is not only not a beneficial one, it nearly tears Stanley’s life apart. Sure, the guy goes out and has the fun that Stanley would like to have, but then he goes bye-bye and leaves the poor slob to clean up the mess. He basically spends the whole movie stuck in a “careful what you wish for” scenario, and the only positive effect the damn mask has on him is that it forces him to be more assertive and take-charge – something like the most complicated and illegal therapy session ever.

Thankfully, we remain invested in all this because we like Stanley. Carrey does a good job playing him as just enough of an oddball that it makes perfect sense for the Mask to come out of him, while still making him a likable, relatable guy. And ‘relatable’ is a good word for him, because, to the filmmaker’s credit, he doesn’t suddenly turn into an action star when he has to go up against his tormentors. Sure, he gets some badass moments, but like most of us he can’t throw a punch to save his life, and if he tries to sneak past the bad guys, he’s probably going to fail. But he muddles through anyway, with or without that garish green face-covering on. The tagline may be “From Zero to Hero” (meaning, of course, the Mask), but they’ve got it wrong. The Mask isn’t the hero of the movie – Stanley is.

So okay, okay, the Mask and Stanley are fine – what about the rest of it? The rest of it is OK, too. I mean, nobody is going to be giving The Mask an award for innovative storytelling anytime soon, but it’s a fun little film, and that’s all it’s really trying to be. Whenever a film is based around a single character and performance, the bits without said performance are going to seem a little lackluster, but who cares? It’s still a lot of fun, and some parts approach brilliance – the “Cuban Pete” sequence, for instance, is dementedly entertaining enough to be worth the price of admission on its own.

In fact, I think the main reason I enjoy this movie as much as I do is that, despite its billing, it’s not really a comedy. It’s marketed as one, and it can be very funny – but really only when the titular character is zipping around. For the rest of the running time, it’s basically a straight-faced adventure story with an element of the fantastic, and I’ve always liked those sorts of combinations. My theory is that most genres – comedy, tragedy, what have you – are more effective when combined with one or two others, and The Mask would seem to bear that out.

It should be addressed, though, that this is not, in point of fact, an original movie – it’s based on a comic, which it is veeeery different from, and which it has largely eclipsed in the public eye. Its fans have complained that the movie is essentially a neutered version of the original, which is much darker and at times verges on being a horror story, with lots of violence and blood. Having only read snippets of it myself, I can’t comment, but I will say that going by what little I have read, The Mask stays more or less true to the overall spirit of the comic, if not the particulars. And anyway, if you want dark and bloody, there are plenty of other movies that will deliver in spades. I’ll just enjoy my wackiness, thank you very much.

Rest-of-characters time. The most prominent member of the supporting cast is Cameron Diaz as Tina Carlyle, and she’s actually rather an interesting character. In many ways, Tina is a classic “bad girl” type – I mean, as the movie starts out, she’s more or less Dorian’s gun moll (albeit without the gun). And while she crosses over to the side of the angels pretty quickly, she doesn’t actually change very much – she’s a seductive, forthright woman, a little on the trashy side as far as cultural stereotypes go, but still sympathetic all the way through.

Really, her growing relationship with Stanley is a definite “opposites attract” sort of thing. Who knows what she had with Dorian once upon a time, but it’s clearly faded now, and while at first Mr. Ipkiss seems like just another mark, this quickly changes. While he sees the girl of his dreams who is clearly out of his league (which is part of the impetus for him continuing to put on the mask), she sees a nice man who treats her as a fellow human being as opposed to a piece of arm candy. Sure, she’s intrigued by his alter ego (who wouldn’t be?), but she’s looking for a real man, not a cartoon character, and in Stanley – plain old regular Stanley – she finds one.

This is a good thing for her, because I doubt she would have survived being in Dorian’s clutches for much longer. Peter Greene plays him as one of the definitive lowlife slimeballs of the ‘90s, a guy who thinks he’s just too cool for words, and is not afraid to lash out at anyone who either disagrees with this or gets in his way. Sure, you can sympathize with him a little bit, since he’s basically just trying to escape from his boss’s iron grip, but honestly, the guy is so incredibly sleazy that he is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ from the green fist of justice. And when (uh, slight spoiler) he does wind up donning the mask, the results are somewhat scary, and remind you of just how dark the source material could get. He may not be one of the more complex villains around, but he’s certainly a memorable one, and has earned a place on my personal second-tier favorites list.

As for the rest, you’ve got Lt. Kellaway, played by Peter Riegert as a persistent and short-tempered thorn in Stanley’s side, and who really is unusually intelligent and competent for a cop in this sort of movie. (This is made up for by Doyle (Jim Doughan), his dimwitted partner.) Amy Yasbeck plays Peggy Brandt, a reporter who is looking into this whole Mask business and is more than what she seems, while Richard Jeni plays Charlie, Stanley’s coworker and only real friend. A good running gag is his increasing bewilderment as his normally socially-invisible pal gets asked for specifically by a succession of beautiful women.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Milo, Stanley’s faithful pet. According to the credits, the actual name of the pooch in question is Max, and I hope he lived to a ripe old age and got lots of doggie treats because he’s a complete scene-stealer here. Sure, he’s cute as the dickens and all, but unlike some animal actors, this dog can act – you don’t see him wagging his tail while growling or the like, and he’s got a natural canine charisma that shines through. (Also, having just reviewed The Adventures of Tintin, I’d swear that some of Snowy’s sequences in that were modeled after Milo’s. Watch the two back-to-back and tell me I’m wrong.)

Final thoughts? The Mask is not in the upper echelon of my movie favorites, but it’s a good, solid film that I enjoy. It’s got a good cast, a great villain, special effects that have held up surprisingly well over the years (considering that they’re supposed to be cartoony), and, of course, the definitive Jim Carrey performance. It’s got its weaknesses, sure, but it’s a fun little flick, and frankly, I couldn’t imagine the ‘90’s without it. Go ahead and check it out, if you haven’t already.

There. The hole, she is filled. Yer welcome.