SON OF THE MASK (2005)

“Jamie Kennedy is the brightest young comic actor rising through Hollywod’s ranks, in the wild and crazy sequel to the film that helped turn Jim Carrey into a superstar. Can lightning strike twice? The young actor only has a few days to find out.” That’s the improvident compliment of Paul Fischer, opening his 2005 interview before the release of Son of the Mask. If only he knew of the brewing storm that began 11 years prior, from the $351M blockbuster success of The Mask (1994).

Nintendo Power magazine ran a competition awarding a walk-on role in the inevitable follow-up. But Jim Carrey had soured on sequels after the critical response to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995). The Mask 2 thus fell by the wayside and the publication’s young winner, Nathan Runk, accepted a consolatory goodie bag and $5,000. Years later, Runk would contemplate, “I didn’t know how bad it was going to be. I’m glad I went with the money.”

The belated sequel, Son of the Mask, follows Tim Avery (Kennedy) after conceiving a son while wearing the titular magical Mask. Now Tim must juggle a genuine bouncing baby boy, a jealous pet dog, a promising cartoon career, and Loki (Alan Cumming) the Norse God of Mischief, who wants his Mask back. Sounds like plenty more Mask madness is in store.

This wasn’t the first nor last ‘franchise’ to carry on without Carrey. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003) and Evan Almighty (2007) have both proven the obvious success was all according to Jim. Jack Black and Ryan Reynolds both turned it down, and Eddie Murphy appeared to have been considered, as his clear likeness is drawn on some cartoon sperm in some early concept art…

The honour of leading the film eventually went to Jamie Kennedy; a man still proud of projects like The Jamie Kennedy Experiment (2002–04), which featured public pranks in various forms of blackface, and the film spin-off Malibu’s Most Wanted (2003), centred on a wannabe Eminem sent to South L.A. to be “scared straight” from the rap scene. He turned down the offer due to scheduling conflicts with Experiment. The studio and network sorted out his schedule. He was then hesitant, as Tim was the straight man with little time in the Mask and preferred the role of Loki. The studio let his TV writing staff take a crack at punching up the script. A chance encounter with Carrey finally convinced him it was the right move to take the role. That, and the studio happily doubled his salary.

Say what you will about the man, and much has been said, but New Line Cinema was betting everything on Jamie Kennedy. The Mask had a $23M budget, which was quadrupled to $100M for Son of the Mask. This immense pressure may explain why, 20 years later, Kennedy is still attempting to draw blood from this negative milestone in his career.

Several YouTube videos on Kennedy’s own official channel, complete with the director guesting, tell their side of the story. Despite their combined running time exceeding the actual movie, Kennedy reduces all his manic grievances down to one simple excuse: New Line slashed their original two-hour vision into an “ADHD clusterfuck.” It seems the real challenge of this retrospective will be to disseminate whose faults lie at whose feet.

There is no conceivable way Son of the Mask is salvageable. Over a half-hour may have been lost to studio meddling, but if there was a good movie here at some point, then they evidently scrapped all two hours and replaced it with… this. It’s believable that scenes and shots have been shortened to haphazardly speed up pacing, but they cannot fundamentally change the migraine-inducing direction of Lawrence Guterman.

Kennedy asserts the director had achieved a range of tones that were ruined in the edit, but the overwhelming nausea is apparent in every frame. Chuck Russell directed The Mask with a clear film noir style that heightened its reality from drab 1990s realism, to allow the cartoon antics to really zing. The status quo of Tim’s suburbia is painted in the same blunt-force infantilism of Cats & Dogs (2001), Guterman’s only other movie. The exterior shots of Tim’s house genuinely look like a playhouse from Barbie (2023), and this is meant to be before the Mask turns everything into a cartoon.

But the root of the problem lies beyond the aesthetics, in the very foundation of the writing. Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) loved cartoons and yearned for unrequited love. Tim is the one leaving everyone else unrequited. At the mention of babies from his wife Tonya (Traylor Howard), he has nightmares of vampiric little monsters, but she loves him even when he’s ignoring her to play video games. When with his newborn son Alvey (Ryan and Liam Falconer), Tim leaves him sitting on the floor in front of the TV so he can do some work; he then goes to bed and Alvey is still sitting there in the night!

The one thing Tim does want, in a tired rehash of every ‘90s movie dad, is a better job. The costumed mascot at an animation company, he really wants to run his own show, despite not actively working on any in any capacity. Kal Penn has a small part hyping up his co-worker to show off his ideas to the boss; Tim nervously introduces himself, pulls out his art book… and then it cuts to him telling Penn that it didn’t pan out. Kennedy was currently running a TV show about awkward encounters and even he couldn’t think of anything funny? This happens multiple times where the absence of a joke is supposed to be the punchline.

As early as 2001, Lance Khazei was attached to the script, and he only ever wrote this one feature film. Though he does have credits on short-lived shows like Politically Incorrect (1997–98) with Bill Maher, and The Chevy Chase Show (1993), so he was well prepared for another star vehicle turned Titanic disaster. Kennedy still argues that he used jokes tested with stand-up crowds and “THEY WORKED!” But alas, Bob Shaye, the head of New Line, supposedly walked out at the end of their test screening, muttering “Cut the movie, cut the fucking movie.”

“The film I started to work on was very different. Entire sequences were removed, new ones were added, plus we had a six-week hiatus in summer 2003 while portions of the movie were being rewritten.”—Jamie Price, Second Unit Director and Head of Visual Effects

The material that survived the chopping block? Tim sleepily tries to feed his crying baby and mistakes a small lamp for a bottle, breaking the bulb on his arm and sticking the broken shards of glass into his infant child’s face. Thanks to the latent powers of the Mask, Alvey’s eyes bug out of his head with a comical warning klaxon, which is enough to stir Tim awake and stop him from disfiguring his own newborn. Ghastly, upsetting, and deeply unfunny, but at the very least decipherable. Tim is a bad father; other plotlines are harder to follow.

Despite appearing in a variety of exhausting disguises in the hunt for this baby, Loki finally confronts Tim an hour into the runtime. Their catch-up is ludicrously abrupt: “That baby is born of the Mask!” yells Loki. “Oh, so that explains how he can pee like that,” responds Tim without hesitation. It’d be almost funny if the scene didn’t continue with Loki trapping Tim in an alleyway to capture the child that Odin (Bob Hoskins) ordered him to track down. Odin possesses Tim and chastises Loki for wasting time and finding that baby… the baby he’s holding… and Loki says as much… but Odin yells over him and sends him off without his powers.

Being human might otherwise make this task harder, but Loki is at their house in less than five minutes, talking to Odin, who gives him his powers back. There are definitely scenes missing between those story beats, but then lines like Loki point-blank asking, “Can’t you love me for who I am and not for who I’m not?” demonstrate nuance was never in their vocabulary to begin with. Wonder if that’ll be the last-minute parallel to this father-son bonding story?

If Alan Cumming is embarrassed by this movie, Traylor Howard must be mortified. The ultra-cool femme-fatale role of the first is replaced by a baby-crazy wife who leaves for a work trip just days after giving birth. The Mask made stars of Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz, but this film can’t wait to get rid of the boring wife once she’s had the kid. She should’ve stayed away, as her return genuinely left me aghast. Loki had just stolen Alvey while disguised as Tonya, so when the real one arrives moments later, Tim is naturally suspicious. Less naturally, we’re treated to a ‘hilarious’ scene of him tackling his wife and repeatedly bashing her head against the floor while screaming inches from her face. This sounds violent and weird and scary, and it is. The punchline to him realising it’s her is when he grabs her breasts.

The worst indignity Howard suffers might be seeing Jamie Kennedy in the Mask and having to ADR the line “Honey, you look hot.” No, he does not. It’s telling that the ending features back-to-back moments of Loki asking if they can patch things up with Mum and Odin replying “Don’t push it”, and Tonya watching Tim’s successful baby versus dad versus dog cartoon and suggesting there should be another character… she’s pregnant again. Why would she deserve to be a character?

Tim bases his cartoon on what he survives in real life, demonstrating his lack of imagination, and I have read some opinions that the concept of a dog vs. baby is in poor taste. In theory, there’s a classic Tom & Jerry formula for two unlikely combatants warring for attention in the home. I even appreciate the crumb of an emotional story that the newborn only wants some attention, knows Tim loves cartoons, and reenacts them to earn his love. The real shame is in practice this is unfathomably hard to watch.

What should’ve been the main draw to this sequel takes over 40 minutes to congregate, and while it’s intended as pure chaos, this is definitely the ground zero of their re-editing hatchet job. The dog, Otis, puts on the Mask at night, doesn’t actually do anything, and then later the next day finally attacks Alvey. What was he doing the entire night while in the Mask? We find out after this brief comic action as it suddenly cuts to the next night where Otis is drawing up blueprints for a second attack. Tim was knocked unconscious before, but now he’s awake none the wiser until he sees Otis in the Mask and faints. Note that 45 minutes in, our protagonist still doesn’t understand what the Mask is or does. Fainting was pointless as it’s now day once again!

After a truly loathsome barrage of slapstick as Otis is comically mutilated throughout the house by Alvey, the film does not pause even five seconds before launching into the next sequence as Tim tries to change Alvey’s nappy and is waterboarded by a literal torrent of baby piss. This midpoint is the line in the sand that separates the men from the boys. A test against the real ones able to endure such unrelenting anti-comedy out of pure spite to say they reached the end of Son of the Mask.

The movie doesn’t start well; it should have opened with ‘Abandon all hope.’ Much like Dante as he reached Lucifer at the ‘bottom’ of Hell, we confront a CGI baby doing the Michigan J. Frog as the “sottosopra,” the ‘upside down’ where Dante’s sense of gravity inverts. Lead animator Scott Huck Wirtz rationalised their process: “We ended up deciding on a shot-per-shot basis how far we could go. Basically, whenever the animation started to look grotesque, we stopped. It was a fine line.” It may feel like we are crawling back up into Hell, but we have passed the centre and are on our way out.

Speaking of grotesqueries, remember when Eddie Murphy was a cartoon sperm? The finalised scene is the conception of Alvey visualised with VFX sperm, thankfully not Kennedy, racing each other towards the egg. This was the tipping point into PG-13 and the studio did not want to fight the MPAA, so deleted it for the US theatrical release. It was restored internationally, though my viewing on Prime Video UK was lacking this money shot.

They bit off too much; there wasn’t nor hasn’t been anything quite like The Mask, and the sequel had to outdo it in every way. Jamie has repeated the oft-given warning never act with children or animals. Words of hindsight after he juggled two babies, a dog, prosthetics, and CGI, and many scenes with all these on screen together. Actors don’t often get their best takes used when the dog wanders off or the baby is about to cry. It’s enough to make any adult cry, and credit to Kennedy, he never shows his exhaustion in an exceptionally energetic and overbearing performance.

Jamie talks about the consideration outside his own acting that he spent an hour a day bonding with the twins so they felt comfortable. Behind-the-scenes footage even shows his thoughtfulness when arguing that a real baby isn’t needed for a shot and swapping him out for a fake one. He similarly spent time with Otis the dog, so he genuinely committed himself to Son of the Mask, even when “they’re asking me to be really connected and I’d say it’s seven. I’m tired. I stayed out really late.” Poor fella shot in Australia and lamented how the locals didn’t care for Americans or celebrities. Howard even added in interviews that he’d do impressions of them even when nobody knew who he was…

Those are about all the niceties I can afford Kennedy. The backstory would allude that New Line believed the only person who could match Jim Carrey was this man. And yet critic Nathan Rabin surmised, “If a movie is dependent on an actor’s charm and personal appeal, then it becomes a critic’s job to point out that they have no charm and are extremely unappealing.”

Harsh, but when an actor stresses they supplied their own material to the writing, they take on a greater burden of responsibility. In the grand reveal of Tim in the Mask, he pulls out an IV when asked for ID, then says it must be in his other trousers, so pulls out a second pair of trousers. These are not the improv whims of a stand-up comic; they require props and digital effects. He had his TV writing staff go over the script to punch it up. This is meant to be a comedy. Even his assessment that the final product was an “ADHD clusterfuck” is wrong: Son of the Mask is interminably slow. When a joke bombs, the dearth of laughter drags a 90-minute film out far longer than the two-hour epic he threatened us with.

What’s especially offensive is the audacity to start by challenging the incredible “Cuban Pete” number with a downright obnoxious genre-hopping rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”, in which Kennedy both croons like Elvis and raps like Eminem. He can barely lip-sync to a word of it when struggling with the rictus chompers that Carrey effortlessly wore. But while he’s singing, it’s the appropriate time to point out he has the perfect face for radio.

The fundamental failing of this Mask is that it doesn’t look good. Egregious, especially when the care put into the original was so effective in paper-thin applications just to accentuate Carrey’s features, allowing his famous rubber face to freely emote. Kennedy’s mask is so rigid and detached it doesn’t resemble the tie-in Halloween costume, but the cheap knock-off. Carrey was also bald as the Mask, but the villain in that had hair, so Kennedy’s bizarre compromise is a solid ginger Lego-piece wig. Count your blessings, as the worst look for Kennedy was blissfully deleted: “I was in make-up for like five hours to become this 300-pound Jamaican woman.”

You get what you signed up for when it’s The Mask with Jamie Kennedy, but truly the most insidious part of this performance comes absent of any Mask nonsense. Loki almost kills him, he loses his job, and he can’t keep his house in one piece without his wife; this is the low point in the hero’s journey… but he learns to love his son. He hugs him, bathes him, puts him to bed, all to the saccharine ukulele plinking of “What a Wonderful World.” This is trying to be a special moment in which our protagonist learns a vital life lesson and it’s doing the daily chores of every normal parent. He’s no longer a man-child and we are meant to applaud him.

Jamie Kennedy is still working on his life lesson as not only did he release those YouTube videos, but he produced an entire documentary to rationalise the vitriolic critical response. Heckler (2007) starts in the world of stand-up as comedians like David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Lewis Black, Maria Bamford, and many more all share their experiences of surviving on-stage against the drunken public. But whereas that focus may make a decent subject, Kennedy stealthily hijacks the project to infer that film critics are basically paid hecklers and personally visits numerous reviewers who panned his work. A truly embarrassing self-expose, Kennedy features an eclectic bunch of similar weirdos like Joe Rogan, Christopher Hitchens, Uwe Boll, Perez Hilton, Carrot Top, Eli Roth, Dennis Prager, and Bill Maher to address the real matter at heart: why can’t everyone like us?

Son of the Mask isn’t the answer. At the end of the day, it’s a bad film. Jim Carrey’s made more than one stinker, he just doesn’t make that his whole identity. And let’s not overlook this is Lawrence Guterman’s film; his debut Cats & Dogs was a middling critical success, but it did gross $200M from a VFX-heavy $60M budget. Son of the Mask cost $100M and only scraped back just shy of $60M. Aside from guesting on the videos, you don’t hear him complaining much that his directorial career ended there and then. Guterman gave Kennedy the life lesson in this very film: when asked where his cartoon pitch of a dog versus baby came from, Tim admits he “stopped trying so hard”.

USA • AUSTRALIA | 2005 | 94 MINUTES | 1.85 :1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Lawrence Guterman.
writer: Lance Khazei (based on ‘The Mask’ by Mike Richardson, John Arcudi, Chris Warner & Doug Mahnke).
starring: Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Kal Penn, Steven Wright, Traylor Howard & Bob Hoskins.