Son of the Mask
I remember watching a
film when I was younger called Mask. Featuring Cher, it was a biopic about a
boy called Rocky Dennis who had a bone disorder (craniodiaphyseal dysplasia,
which is also known as lionitis) that severely disfigured his face. It’s
actually a very good movie, with great performances from Cher and Eric Stoltz
(as Rocky) it hits hard and has stuck with me all my life. So you can imagine
my disgust when I found out that somebody had tried to cash in with a sequel to
this! However my rage was short lived when I discovered that Son of the Mask
was actually a sequel to the Jim Carrey movie based on the Dark Horse comic,
The Mask.
Tim Avery (Jamie
Kennedy) is a wannabe cartoonist who is reluctant to become a father, even
though his wife Tonya (Traylor Howard) desperately wants a baby. When his dog,
Otis, finds the Mask of Loki Tim wears it to a Halloween party. This turns him
into the party loving hero The Mask, who takes the party by storm. He goes home
still wearing the mask and Tim and Tonya conceive a baby. When the baby is born
it has the powers normally only granted by the mask. After watching the cartoon
One Froggy Evening, the baby, Alvey (Liam and Ryan Falconer), decides to mess
with his fathers head and only show his powers when nobody but Tim is looking.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Otis accidentally puts on the mask and
becomes a dog version of the hero, who then battles Alvey. Whilst all this is
happening, the Norse god Loki (Alan Cumming) is trying to find his mask, and
eventually Tim must battle him to save his son.
The original movie of
The Mask really helped to launch Jim Carrey’s career as a leading actor. We
could debate whether of not this is a good thing for hours (my stance is that
his serious roles proved him to be an extremely fine actor, but his comedy
roles mostly fell flat for me), but I think it’s acceptable to state that his
role as Stanley Ipkiss in the original movie was a brilliant comic performance
(I had to rewatch it after I watched this movie and honestly I’d forgotten how
fun it was). To then make a sequel of a much loved movie eleven years later
without any of the original cast (apart from a cameo by Ben Stein) was really a
very risky idea.
Before I saw this
movie I’d only ever seen Jamie Kennedy as Randy Meeks in the Scream franchise
(although looking at his biography on IMDB it turns out that he’s had parts in
a lot of movies that I’ve seen), so had never associated him as a comedy actor.
Strangely after seeing this film I still don’t associate him as a comedy actor.
In fact I barely look at him as an actor in this.
Having to play the
essentially the same character whilst wearing the mask as Jim Carrey is just
beyond Kennedy’s range. He doesn’t have the in your face energy that made
Carrey so successful in the role. Luckily he only has to don the mask twice in
the movie and the focus for the masks powers are on baby Alvey and Otis, which
ends up in a movie so reliant on CGI that I can’t believe that George Lucas
wasn’t involved in this. The CGI itself sometimes actually looks pretty good
(especially the bits with Otis), but on other occasions it’s just plain awful
(generally the Alvey bits).
I have to admit that I
actually laughed out loud at the battles between Alvey and Otis, which have a really
nice Tom and Jerry feel to them (complete with explosives disguised as bones
and overly convoluted traps that backfire on Otis). There’s even some
traditionally animated cartoon sequences that I found reminiscent of Baby
Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Whilst none of this is original in anyway, and
its best gags are lifted directly from One Froggy Evening and The Flintstones, it
appealed to the part of me that will still happily watch cartoons for hours
enough to actually keep me entertained.
As for the rest of the
actors, Alan Cumming gives a nice comic book villain performance as Loki, even
though he’s constantly being dressed in a variety of wacky disguises as he
attempts to track down the mask baby. Of course this does raise a few
questions, firstly is why? Nobody has seen him before and he has godly powers,
so why put on a ridiculous outfit when visiting the various houses? He could
surely just do whatever he wanted to? Secondly, a few films back on this list, we
learnt that whenever a god leaves a mask on Earth he leaves a guardian to
protect it (often with powers not normally associated with the animal they’re
named after). So where was the Viking throwing babies from windows seeing if
they’d bounce (the mask baby would) just like in Pumaman? Isn’t this the norm
these days?
Traylor Howard doesn’t
really do much in the movie, and Stephen Wright (as Avery’s boss, Daniel Moss)
is pretty forgettable. Bob Hoskins plays a small cameo role as Odin. Of course
Hoskins is an actor who’s had previous experience acting in a movie alongside
flat, lifeless characters, who nonetheless featured among their number someone
that all the boys fancied even though they knew that they really shouldn’t. But
the less said about his cameo in Spiceworld, the better…
The general look of
the movie, from sets to costume actually has a really nice comic book feel to
it. No matter how much you hate this movie, you can’t deny that it’s well
designed at least. The worst part of the design for me was Kennedy’s version of
The Mask. Whilst Carrey’s version was faithful to the original comic and looked
impressive in it’s simplicity, Kennedy’s version is saddled with a oversized
comedy chin and crappy plastic orange wig that looks like it’s from a live
action Dragon Ball Z.
Honestly I can’t
recommend you track it down and watch it, and would suggest that you watch the original instead
(or the Looney Tunes classic One Froggy Evening
which would basically save you nearly an hour and a half of you're life), but if you do find yourself watching this movie
for some reason, then just take it for what it is. It may be pretty badly acted, and
Jamie Kennedy may not be a patch on Jim Carrey, but it’ll probably be enough to
keep the kids quiet on a rainy Sunday. Whilst this may not be a great movie,
it’s the first comedy we’ve watched on this list that I’ve genuinely laughed
at, and for that reason I don’t think it deserves to be this low down, if it
deserves to be on the list at all.
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