Jamie
When Harry me Lloyd? Don’t you mean “When Jamie and Patrick Met Bad Movies”? Now Patrick is going to spin you a yarn later about us watching this movie in theaters because we were making the big bucks at our summer jobs and no longer understood the value of time and money. Time and money were for suckers and suckers didn’t watch Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. This is a nice tale. Unfortunately it’s WRONG. Hulk and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd were indeed two theatrical films we watched in 2003, but not because we were making the big bucks. Check out the dates when those films came out: June 13th and June 17th. We were making the big bucks while school was in session? I think not. As my memory serves (correctly), these were the two movies we used our free passes to the local cinema purchased from our high school tennis team fundraiser. So yeah we weren’t considering time and money because it was free and we had the whole beautiful summer in front of us.
To recap, Lloyd, the oft-held back son of the school janitor, and Harry, the long home schooled new kid, are on a crash course… literally. Not only do we get the origin story of when Harry met Lloyd on that first day of school, but also the origin story for Lloyd’s chipped tooth. Awesome. Anyway, our two heroes are immediately wrapped up in a scheme by the criminal school principal and his lover, the lunch lady, who aim to start a special ed class to embezzle money from. Harry and Lloyd are tasked with getting the class filled and, due to the odd mixture of students they snag, plucky girl reporter Jessica starts on the scent. What else happens? Uh… some racist caricaturing. There is a treasure hunt Harry’s mom made up that they are trying to find. They go to a museum. Harry mistakenly smears chocolate all over a bathroom and Bob Sagat thinks his bathroom is covered in poop. Just a bunch of classy gags for a very classy film. Ultimately both the reporter and the class discover the plot after Lloyd snags the treasure chest full of evidence the principal keeps (thinking it’s Harry’s treasure by mistake). They decide to entrap the principal at the big TGivs parade and the reporter and everyone hails them as heroes. Ultimately, though, they don’t get the girl and instead Bob Sagat thinks they smeared a bunch of poop on his car or whatever. THE END.
Hmmmm, let’s start with a compliment. I thought the actor who portrayed Lloyd was very good. No wonder he went on to star in NCIS: Los Angeles. Not much to say outside of that. I recall liking the Bob Sagat bits when I saw this in the theater, but I think I kind of forgot the set up with the chocolate bar and stuff. All of it is quite dumb and mildly offensive. It also has that 80’s/90’s kids movie trope where the principal has to have some kind of complicated plot he’s hatching that our heroes have to foil. Why? I guess because there’s nothing else for a couple of dumb people to do. I think I would have preferred for them to go full straight-to-video 90’s and have the school taken over by terrorists or something. Anyway, there is very little to recommend in this film. The acting is tragic besides Lloyd and a totally out of place and underutilized Shia LaBeouf. The real tragedy is that this went to theaters so you can’t ignore its existence like we all do with Ace Ventura Jr.
Hot Take Clam Bake! This film does not actually take place in 1986 but rather 1992 and thus I believe that these are in fact imposters and not the Harry and Lloyd we met in Dumb and Dumber. Exhibit A is the excessive use of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby, a song released in 1990. Now you are probably like “it’s just a song, dummy, meant to evoke the attitude of Lloyd dancing to something else.” Oh yeah, well how about Exhibit B? At one point in the film Lloyd uses the phrase “It’s on like Donkey Kong.” This phrase is attributed to Ice Cube from his 1992 album Predator. I just seriously doubt that 6 years earlier the dumbest man on the planet beat Ice Cube to the punch. Next you’ll be saying he’s a time traveler… wait a sec… HOLY SHIT! Hot Take Temperature: Vanilla Ice Cube.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Are we talking about the one where you make a totally disconnected prequel but you still just play back all the best jokes from the original? Let’s go!
We ended up watching this as a bonus since it came out too early for the cycle. Time to finish the Dumb and Dumber franchise once and for all (well, until we decide to change over to the Bad Cartoon Twins I guess, there was a cartoon right?).
And fun fact, 2003. This would have been when we were making the big bucks during the summer and realizing “wait … we can just watch any movie that comes to theaters?” And we did. This and The Hulk are the two I distinctly remember from the summer of 2003. Nothing else really sticks out except I don’t think I watched X2 because I distinctly remember watching that twice on some plane ride. Given the year, I think it was likely the flight I took to London a year later?
Wait one goddamned second, Grind was 2003. Impressive, our friends who made us watch that a thousand times were on the cutting edge getting that on VHS.
Oh, this movie … but I was having so much fun reminiscing about the random movies I watched in and around 2003.
This movie is dumb and disgusting. I don’t actually really get though why the story is that Harry was cast first and they were dead set on him, and then he had to convince them to cast the guy who played Lloyd … I thought the guy playing Lloyd ultimately was way better and looked much more like the original character. Whatever.
No jokes are funny, the love interest story is dumb, and the underlying A story of a conspiracy to bilk some fund of money for special education is a waste of time.
In a way it is a perfect movie to explain why 2000-2008 was just the absolute best for bad movies. They decided to make this without input of the original creators or any of the actors at all. They made it and it got released to theaters in this form. It made $26 million. Lunacy.
Obviously Setting as a Character (Where?) for Rhode Island which is where all Dumb and Dumber movies begin. Secret Holiday Film Alert (When?) for TGivs as there is a parade surrounding this at the end. And I’ll throw out a Worst Twist (How?) for the ultimate reveal that everything that happened in the movie was kind of pointless since they were already running a sting operation on the principal so he was going to be caught regardless. This movie is a BMT movie, it perfectly represents everything that is wrong with early-2000s comedies and movie making.
Read about the prequel to my own betrayal in the quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 