The comedy classic Dumb and Dumber featured funnyman Jim Carrey at the pinnacle of his career, but how does the trilogy stack up from worst to best? Released in 1994 to immediate success, Dumb and Dumber was a perfect mixture of a buddy comedy with the screwball tone of the 1990s. The film brought together Carrey and his co-star Jeff Daniels and the pair had electric chemistry on screen. Despite being unabashedly goofy, there was a lovable quality to main characters Lloyd (Carrey) and Harry (Daniels) that justified two sequels that further explored their ridiculous lives.
Dumb and Dumber was a box office smash and grossed almost $250 million (via Jim Carrey's best movies, Dumb and Dumber hasn't necessarily aged well, and some of the movie's jokes wouldn't stand up under modern scrutiny.
3 Dumb And Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003)
Flashing back to the 1980s, 2003's Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd aimed to be something of an origin story for the two beloved characters. The film follows Harry Dunne (Derek Richardson) as he attends public school for the first time and befriends Lloyd Christmas (Eric Christian Olsen). Without the benefit of the Farrelly brothers or the original film's two stars, the comedy fell flat. It did little to justify its own existence, and it came off as an attempt to cash in on the successful brand name without understanding what made the original so funny.
2 Dumb And Dumber To (2014)
The 20-year-old film had lost none of its hold on audiences by 2014, and when the original cast and crew returned for Dumb and Dumber To, fans did as well. In the film, Harry (Daniels) and Lloyd (Carrey) embark on a cross-country trip to reunite Harry with his long-lost daughter. Daniels and Carrey had no trouble finding their chemistry on screen after so many years. Dumb and Dumber To deserves more credit, as it isn't as bad as many ed. Nevertheless, it exposed the problematic nature of the original when seen in the modern day, and it failed to have as many memorable moments as the first film.
1 Dumb And Dumber (1994)
Released during the height of the Jim Carrey star-power that swept the 1990s, 1994's Dumb and Dumber was like a time capsule to the decade it was released in. When a briefcase full of cash is accidentally left in Harry's car, he and his best friend Lloyd travel to Colorado to return it, and find themselves in the middle of a kidnapping plot. Besides the pairing of Carrey and Daniels, the thing that made Dumb and Dumber work so well was the film's entertaining plot, and the variety of silly situations the characters found themselves in.
The juxtaposition of the regular people with Harry and Lloyd's ridiculous antics was where most of the humor came from, and it was that tone that the sequels and prequels failed to live up to. The overwhelming success of Dumb and Dumber was due in large part to Carrey's meteoric rise to the top, but there was enough quality within the film's writing to help earn its place as a 1990s classic. Even so, the humor of the film became dated over the ensuing decades and much of the comedy came at the expense of others which made the film problematic.
