Review of Son of the Mask (2005) by Gareth R — 25 Jan 2009

Son Of The Mask is a film nobody wanted, which perhaps explains why it's so eager to please. All director Lawrence Guterman wants is to make you laugh (and if possible, forgive him), but he tries too hard. His film strains so badly to be zany and funny that it comes across merely as flailing, hysterical desperation. This film needs a slap.

So, after the events of the original Mask film - we don't know how much time has passed, although presumably not a lot - the troublesome mask ends up in the possession of Tim Avery (Jamie Kennedy), an immature animator with a broody young wife and a dog for a best friend. He goes to a Halloween work party, and of course, puts on the mask. The resulting transformation of Jamie Kennedy into Jamie Kennedy acting-like-a-smug-moron is an amazing mixture of misjudged, annoying and utterly unfunny. Avery/Mask performs a horrifying rap rendition of Can't Take My Eyes Off You, that I lamentably can't scrape out of my memories. He somehow impresses everyone to the extent that his boss, an animation mogul, gives him that show he's been dreaming of, provided it features the green character at the party. (What, the hideously unfunny and irritating green character?) Avery/Mask rushes home and sleeps with his wife, with the mask still on, and she gets pregnant. How lovely.

Meanwhile, Loki (Alan Cumming), the Norse God whose mask it is, is on Earth trying to get his mask back. This means a lot of scenes of the apparently certifiable Alan Cumming adopting bad costumes and even worse accents while he checks to see if any newborn babies have Mask powers. These scenes are annoying, of course, but nothing compared to what's going on back at the Avery household.

Poor Tim has been left alone with the baby, Alvy, who hates his Dad and wants to drive him insane. He does this by bursting into song and performing general CGI shenanigans. (He's inspired by that old cartoon with the singing frog, which is in Son Of The Mask just long enough to make us wish we were watching back-to-back Looney Tunes instead.) I was stunned to see Industrial Light & Magic credited at the end, because the special effects here, along with everywhere else in the film, look shoddy and unfinished. But the baby in particular is an awe-inspiringly awful creation, almost as misjudged and horrible to behold as Avery/Mask. Unsettling to look at, unfunny to watch, it's a case of writer and director making as much noise and movement as possible to distract from the absence of jokes. What were they thinking? When Tim's dog gets the mask - which, ignoring the logic of Film #1, stays on during the day-time - both dog and baby start trying to kill each other. These scenes at least have a near Looney Tunes rhythm about them, and there are several genuinely amusing little comedy footnotes here. I think of them as joke shrapnel.

With direction like this, however, you may miss them. Guterman has the camera constantly zooming and swooping around, obviously trying to make all of this as Zany And Funny as possible. It's wretchedly unpleasant to look at - seriously, how often do we need to see up Jamie Kennedy's nostrils? - and it's part of the film's big problem. In The Mask, Jim Carrey's green-faced demon is funny because he's juxtaposed against a normal(ish) world. The contrast of cartoon comedy and noiry crime is what makes it work. Here, however, everyone and everything seems to have some sort of hysterical cartoon logic, and it sucks the humour out of each cartoony sequence. By the end, four characters have used superpowers. The thrill has very much gone by then. It's just too much.

At least there's some kind of emotional story going on here. Tim is coming to terms with being a father, Alvy is coming to terms with having a father, and Loki is trying to get attention from Odin, who much prefers his other sons. In theory, this is good stuff. But the characters are written and acted so badly, I don't care about any of them. I hope Tim sells that thing to a laboratory and then gets a real job, and I couldn't give two hoots if Odin reduces his own nauseating offspring to charcoal.

Aside from the aforementioned joke shrapnel, there's nothing to recommend. Kennedy has played likeable and funny characters before, so why does he miss the mark so badly here? Cumming struggles with his American accent, as does Bob Hoskins (bafflingly cast as Odin), and his scenes suffer from just not being as funny as the filmmakers think. The actors, in general, look like they want to get out of here. (And who can blame them?) The plot is loose and forgetful, the jokes either bodily function or CGI-based, and the whole thing seems to have no grasp whatsoever of what's funny. Son Of The Mask is often repulsive, always annoying, and of course, it's totally pointless, since it's a sequel that makes no substantial link to its predecessor. The only honest-to-God good bits are the old cartoons characters sometimes watch. In comparison to that pitch-perfect short about the singing frog, Son Of The Mask could have been written and acted by drunken five-year-olds.

It's the kind of cinematic nightmare that sinks careers. The equivalent of poking yourself in the eyes for ninety minutes, I can think of no reason for you to watch this, other than the fact that, by the law of averages, even worse films probably exist in the world.