MOVIE REVIEW : More Giggles Than Groans in ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’

Let’s talk elasticity: When Jim Carrey goes on a crying jag, his enormous mouth turns into such a gaping canyon that your mind might wander to wondering just how many whole grapefruits could be stuffed into it. When he deigns to close those choppers, he doesn’t so much smile as he clenches every muscle within a six-inch radius of his overbite into a maniacal grin that makes him look like a handsomely dimpled gerbil.

Here, you think, is a guy who may have spent too much time working out at the facial-tic gym. The term rubber-mugged hardly begins to suffice, when even Carrey’s tiniest expressions of physicality are so broadly exaggerated he makes Jim Varney look like Charles Bronson by comparison.

A movie with such a relentlessly manic guy at its constant center sounds as if it would probably be irritating as hell. And to a lot of people, it will be. But “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (general release), uneven as its farcical pleasures may be, proves perfectly capable of inducing the most unexpected giggle fits. Carrey’s refusal to be anything less than utterly inhuman on screen is heroic on its own brave, nutty, pretty funny terms. He’s so over-energized from the start you keep thinking he’ll wear out his welcome pronto; an hour and a half later, his lunacy is still hard to take your eyes off.

Carrey, best known as a stand-up comic and TV sketch artist (of “In Living Color” fame), plays a celebrated “pet dick,” or finder of missing mammals. A lot of his work involves recovering cats and dogs in disputed divorce cases. (“Make any good collars lately?” mock the police. “Or were they leashes?”) But he stumbles across bigger fish to fry when he’s called in to look for the missing aquatic mascot of Miami’s pro football franchise, which has been dolphin-napped just before a Super Bowl.

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Along the way he gets romantically involved with a team rep (Courteney Cox, not having much to do but look comely in the Priscilla Presley role) and crosses swords with an adversarial police lieutenant (Sean Young, enjoying yet another self-parodying part in which she gets to be called “psycho-woman”).

Puerility does sometimes reach its limits here. And the movie is necessarily limited by Carrey’s never getting to evolve beyond cartoon-character status; he’s like Roger Rabbit or Howard the Duck, so far adrift is his two-dimensional lunacy from the “straight” world. But as live-action cartoons go, he’s a fairly inspired one.

Ace winds up wildly patronizing virtually everyone he comes across, in that popular post-modern way. But lest the picture bog down completely in the ironic comedy of condescension (a la, say, Chevy Chase’s singularly smug “Fletch” sleuth), the hero is also afforded a childlike bond with the mutts, fish and fowl of the world.

Director Tom Shadyac (who co-wrote with Jack Bernstein and Carrey) just barely holds back from overplaying the Dr. Doolittle angle. But it’s nice that for almost every wicked put-down Ace Ventura dishes out, he also gets to enjoy an innocent moment of purely animalistic joie de vivre , like the way he sticks his head out the car window every time he drives.

Who among us--possibly excepting pro-vivisection radicals or the severely Jerry Lewis-phobic--is prepared to resist a hero so liberated he lives his entire life doggy-style?

‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ Jim Carrey: Ace Ventura

Courteney Cox: Melissa Sean Young: Lt. Einhorn Tone Loc: Emilio Dan Marino: Himself

A Warner Bros. presentation of a Morgan Creek production. Director Tom Shadyac. Producer James G. Robinson. Executive producer Gary Barber. Screenplay by Shadyac, Jack Bernstein, Jim Carrey. Cinematographer Julio Macat. Editor Don Zimmerman. Music Ira Newborn. Production design William Elliott. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13, for mild language. Times guidelines: Some profanity and two scenes of gymnastic sexuality punctuating slapstick that is otherwise quite mild.