“I like it a lot.“

Alright, alright, so… I’m flipping the script already. Look, I’m prone to do this, but it’s better to iron out these creases sooner rather than later, right? Instead of running a daily post (for posterity, the first four posts on this site made in July 2026 were titled The Razorwire Reviews Daily Bulletin #1, #2, etc.) I’m going to somewhat adopt the form in which I organise my YouTube channel’s videos. For any video that isn’t a part of its own dedicated series/project, I simply archive it by year and episode number. I’ll eschew the yearly system for this site though, and simply number most pieces numerically, so this will be Razorwire Reviews #5, easy enough? This way I can keep posting regularly but not feel tied to a daily schedule, especially as I have other things going on in my life at the moment. Really, this was the worst possible time to attempt such an ambitious pursuit, but again, this is me all over…

So what are we talking about today? Well. I was thinking about the film Dumb and Dumber To (2014) and how I often forget it even happened. People who didn’t grow up in the 90s will never fully grasp the phenomenon that was Jim Carrey in his heyday. In February of 1994, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was released. In July: The Mask. Before the year closed out, in December, a little film called Dumb and Dumber premiered. That’s what the kool kids today would call a “generational run.” When you consider how beloved each of those three films are, and how much of a vehicle they were for Jim Carrey’s manic zaniness, it’s hard to imagine a comparable break out year. I’m sure there are many examples, but that one, in a calendar year, feels incredibly rare to me.

And you could make an argument for how dated those films may feel today, looking back over thirty years to when they were first released (fucking hell…) and comparing them to the standards of 2026. I certainly think a large part of Ace Ventura stoked a lot of accepted and casual transphobia of that time, which makes me quite cautious to revisit it now. So I was browsing YouTube last night and I came across a video of someone reacting to Dumb and Dumber (1994) for the first time. Now I follow quite a few reaction channels, and I’m pretty picky because a lot of them can be quite performative or uninteresting. There’s a few good ones out there though and while I never have the time to watch them in full, I do enjoy skimming through some of the parts I’m intrigued to see first timers reacting to.

It can also act as something of a speedrun revisit of a favourite film, or in some cases spark my desire to actually pull it off the shelf and properly rewatch it. In the case of Dumb and Dumber, a true touchstone film of my childhood, I enjoyed seeing LiteWeight Reacting watching it and responding with the appropriate amount of amusement, shock and delight. Then I remembered the sequel. Good God, that sequel. See in the 90s, the thought of “Dumb and Dumber 2” was genuinely exciting. It was the kind of thing the internet was amazing for back then. Speculating and fantasising about sequels to films you loved, and hanging on to any kernel of information that it might actually be happening. For twenty years, the prospect of catching up with Harry and Lloyd one more time waned considerably and after a pretty awful prequel film (2003’s Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd), the elusive Dumb and Dumber 2 seemed dead.

Until it wasn’t.

I have to remind myself that back in 2013, when this image was released, giving us our first look at Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels back on set for a true Dumb and Dumber sequel, I was still in my mid-20s. It was mind-blowing! Holy shit! They’re back! The bowl cut! Jim Carrey’s chipped tooth! What a time to be alive! etc. etc. These days I’m not so easily impressed and am generally a more cynical, grouchy person who is staring down the tunnel at the big 4-0. Still, I had hope that this would be great! I didn’t even consider the possibility that it would just be decent, I was hoping for it to be awesome! The Farrelly brothers were directing, Jim and Jeff are great actors, surely it’s a slam dunk?

Well, before we get to the annoyingly titled “legacy sequel,” I should point out that following the previously mentioned prequel that we shall never mention again, I took matters into my own hands and made Dumb and Dumber 3: The Kids in 2003. I was fifteen years old at the time and had been making my own films with my cousins Adam and Jodi since I was eleven. I can actually look to my first film that I made in 1999 (Wild Wild Wales) with a certain amount of pride because I came up with the story, the lines, directed what we were doing and edited it all myself using my VHS-C camera and a VCR, all before I’d even started high school. And it wasn’t… the worst thing in the world?

But Dumb and Dumber 3? Yeah, that’s a big pile of shit. My first film plays much better at 16 minutes in length, whereas this monstrosity was just over an hour, and not much of it any good. We had more time that summer to make something (I’d typically only see my cousins every year during the summer holidays) and free reign at their grandparents house. And we were setting out to make something truly stupid to begin with, so continuity mistakes were leaned into, bad jokes were strung out beyond belief and any semblance of trimming the fat in the editing process was out of the question. The longer, the better! I even shot it in “widescreen,” an unfortunate choice that merely cuts off the top and bottom of the square frame 4:3 ratio my Hi8 camcorder could record in to begin with.

In digging up this film to get some stills for this piece, I found myself watching parts of it and chuckling, surprisingly. I expected to full body cringe at what I knew was an ungodly mess, but there was one moment that really tickled me. My cousin Adam, playing “Lloyd Jr.” asks me, “Harry Jr.” what we’re going to get up to that day.

Lloyd Jr: “So… what are we gonna do today?”

Harry Jr: “I… don’t know.”

Lloyd Jr: “We could… play on the PlayStation?”

Harry Jr: “Don’t wanna get electrocuted again.”

Lloyd Jr: “Go out skateboarding?”

Harry Jr: “Ooooh… I don’t fancy cutting my head open again.”

Lloyd Jr: “Oh I know… do some graffiti on next door’s wall!”

Harry Jr: “… We can’t spell.”

We take way too long pausing between each response, likely trying to remember our lines, but it was a cute bit of dialogue, which was eventually interrupted by Jodi from behind the camera. Standing in for any kind of real sound effect, she cuts me off with a very monotone: “Ding. Dong.” From here it descends into something truly ludicrous as me and Adam very slowly react to the doorbell ringing with stilted, lifeless and painfully drawn out dialogue. I’d forgotten this part, where we were intentionally sending up our OWN bad acting from the home movies we’d made years earlier. For while I had made my first film in 1999, Adam and Jodi had been at it since 1996 with their dad, who made a fun spoof type film with them every year. I got to join the fun in 1998 with The Three Rascals, where our nan played the evil villain.

I was sat at my desk last night, watching Dumb and Dumber 3, shaking my head and laughing at the thought of us already leaning into self parody at such a young age. And while it would play like death to anyone but the three of us, that’s precisely why I find it so funny now. Which got me thinking… if I had to choose one “third Dumb and Dumber film” to delete from history, and one to keep and revisit, would I cast Dumb and Dumber To (2014) into movie hell… or Dumb and Dumber 3: The Kids (2003)? You can probably guess the answer.

Sure, if I had to sit down and watch it with anyone I’d probably want to turn my mouth inside out and eat my own head with embarrassment but… I’d definitely have a better time with it than the “official” sequel. Because while I walked into a welcoming and warm cinema in the winter of 2014, full of excitement and hope, I returned outside a couple of hours later struck by both the brisk Norwegian air and the fact that Dumb and Dumber To (2014) hadn’t been very good. I didn’t think it was as awful as most people, but there was a kind of sadness to seeing Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey stepping back into the clothes of Harry and Lloyd a little too literally. They actually were just wearing the same clothes, and after twenty years, nothing had really changed. I suppose that’s part of the overall gag and in fairness that’s fully supported by what the story of the film is.

Still, seeing dudes in their fifties (Jeff was almost 60) acting like idiots in their thirties didn’t feel anywhere near as much fun as I’d hoped. It had some fun callbacks to the original, and there were some amusing parts, but while Jim Carrey’s mugging somehow played well back in the 90s, it felt a little tragic in 2014. Maybe my memory is skewed, as I have not returned to the film in the past decade, and don’t feel any real pull to. It’s filed in my mind as a forgotten fever dream of sorts, it genuinely surprises me sometimes to remember it even exists. There’s a few really crude sexual jokes in it that just icked me out too, and even if Jeff Daniels having explosive diarrhoea in the original was hysterical, Jim Carrey rubbing his hand on his asshole and making someone smell it (again, as a fifty year old man) was just a step too far for me.

Possibly I could go back to it and be surprised, but somehow I doubt it. I watched the trailer again and found it hard to believe I was ever fooled into thinking it was going to be great. Legacy sequels rarely are, and a few years later, David Lynch released Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), which fully leaned into and harnessed the cold, hard fact… that you can never really go back. It just won’t work.

Razorwire Reviews #5
29/07/26