It's not as bad as they say, but it's also far from being a good movie.
There are characters that seem to stick to the skin of the actor who plays them, and that's what happened with Ace Ventura. He stuck with Jim Carrey. Conceiving a film with this character without the actor who brought him to life in two consecutive films would always be a bad idea, but that's precisely what they decided to do. And how did they do it? How did the studios get around the problem? Making a movie about Ace's son rather than the father, who is conveniently killed.
The film was the target of a veritable hate campaign. People who didn't like the Carrey movies obviously had nothing to like here, and people who liked those movies might have been disappointed by his absence. I'm not going to go into campaigns or vilify the film just because. I'm going to be honest and say what I think, no matter who it hurts (that's what I always do). And I think that the film is not as bad as they say it is, and it is frankly better than “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls”, which was for me the worst film in this trilogy. It's not a good movie, but it's not a piece of garbage either.
The secret to trying to understand this film is to peacefully accept Carrey's absence and understand that this is not a dishonest job: it doesn't seem to me that the production has tried to take advantage of the success of previous films to make money off of it. The character Ace Jr. is very similar to his father, but we also cannot assume that he will behave and act in the same way (even if this is rehearsed and the similarities are noticed). And the humor is much more familiar and friendly than before, with no embarrassing moments or situations for parents who decide to see this with their children, and that's always something I value in comedies of this type.
The film's problem turns out to be the script, very weak and incapable of detaching itself from what we've already seen in Carrey's films. Animals mysteriously disappear, stolen by malevolent minds, and Ventura will have to go find them and return them to their home. It would have been much better to have a film with something new, trying to think outside the box. Filmed in 2009, when there was already so much talk about endangered species, environmental problems and human damage to fauna, why weren't these hot topics used for a different script, more airy, different from what we've already seen?
Justin Flitter did a satisfying job in the lead role. The boy has charisma, he has sympathy, he manages to model the character, but he is obviously too young. His partner Emma Lockhart, who has stopped doing work as an actress, is limited to being a friendly face and a possible romantic partner. Ann Cusack can't do much, but she has the necessary presence, and Ralph Waite only appears because the script needed him in some very concrete moments.
