Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsWhat's Your Vulgarity Threshold?
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2021
After some years I've now rewatched "There's Something About Mary." I'm struggling to sort out my jumbled reaction: far more work than a comedy should demand.
The reviewers on this site who bemoan its coarse, junior-high level humor have a point. That's the Farrelly Brothers style. You take it or leave it. I love black comedies (see "A Fish Called Wanda") and the best of Mel Brooks farce, all of which should pitch me out of The Prudes' Club. That said, some scenes in "Mary" seem gratuitously nasty. They needn't have made the final cut; the movie was funny enough without them. The brothers were pushing us to laugh at some things that aren't funny. The effect is mean-spirited.
The case for the defense: the premise, most of the performances, and many of this movie's scenes are so funny that I did laugh out loud. Mary (Cameron Diaz)—kind, pretty, capable—is the still center around which chaos erupts and for which she is its unintended cause. Matt Dillon renders a perfect slimeball. Ben Stiller earns his laughs by playing the schlimazel: a mensch to whom horrible things happen. On Chris Elliott ("Groundhog Day") you can always depend. The rest of the cast provide underplayed or gross support, as the script requires. A nice touch is the constant reappearance of a pair of minstrels to comment on the story. Neither makes any pretense to play his guitar or drums.
The movie's two most memorable scenes, both involving the same anatomical member of the character played by Mr. Stiller, remain hilarious. The first is marred by an insert that no audience needed to see: it's funnier if left to the imagination. The second earns its laughs by Ms. Diaz's deadpan and some clever hairstyling. For a movie so edgy, this one ends, surprisingly, like a sit-com episode: a comic twist on an Agatha Christie reveal.
Boy, what an uneven movie. "Mary" intends to leap so far over the top, for both good and bad, that few will be neutral about it. My 2.5 stars attempt a measured evaluation of bawdy that spits in the eye of measured evaluations.