Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Plot

Ace Ventura works as a private detective in Miami, but his specialty is finding lost animals. The Miami Police Department often makes fun of him. When the Miami Dolphins’ dolphin mascot, Snowflake, is taken from the stadium, the team’s publicist, Melissa Robinson, asks Ventura to get the dolphin back before the Super Bowl. While looking into the case, Ventura finds an amber stone in Snowflake’s tank and starts to suspect Ronald Camp, a rich man who collects exotic animals.

At a party at Camp’s house, Ventura searches the place and barely gets away from a shark. He then sees Camp wearing a 1984 AFC Championship ring with an amber stone that looks like the one he found, but after checking, he sees Camp’s stone is whole and crosses him off the list. Ventura next thinks someone from the 1984 Dolphins team might be guilty, but every player’s championship ring is undamaged. When Roger Podacter, the Dolphins’ head of operations, falls from his apartment balcony, the police call it suicide, but Ventura says it was murder.

Digging deeper, Ventura and Robinson learn about a former placekicker named Ray Finkle. Finkle joined the team midseason and missed the winning field goal in a Super Bowl loss years ago. He blamed quarterback Dan Marino for the mistake, was sent to a psychiatric facility for threatening to kill Marino, escaped, and vanished. Worried Finkle might go after Robinson and Marino, Ventura takes her to his apartment for safety.

The next day, he goes to Finkle’s hometown and confirms Finkle’s past and his obsession with revenge against Marino. Before Ventura can get back to Miami, Marino is kidnapped. Ventura and Robinson break into the facility where Finkle was held and find a newspaper article about a missing hiker named Lois Einhorn. A police contact finds a love letter from Podacter addressed to Einhorn, which leads Ventura to realize Finkle took on Einhorn’s identity and got a job inside the police department.

Release

Warner Bros. released Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1,750 theaters in the United States and Canada on February 4, 1994. The film grossed $12.1 million on its opening weekend, ranking first at the box office and outperforming other new releases My Father the Hero and I'll Do Anything. Opening-weekend audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A−" on a scale of A to F. For its second weekend, it grossed $9.7 million and ranked first at the box office again, outperforming newcomers The Getaway, Blank Check, and My Girl 2.

Variety reported of Ace Ventura's second weekend in box office performance, "The goofball comedy defied dire predictions by trackers, slipping just 20% for a three-day average of $5,075 and $24.6 million in 10 days." The Los Angeles Times reported, "Audiences are responding enthusiastically to Carrey's frenzied antics... [The film] is especially a hit with the 10- to 20-year-old age group it was originally targeted for. Box-office grosses indicate that many fans are going back to see the film again."

It grossed $72.2 million in the United States and Canada and $35 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $107.2 million. The film's US box office performance led Variety to label it a "sleeper hit". Its best performance overseas was in Italy. On home video, Ace Ventura sold 4.2 million home videos in its first three weeks, which Los Angeles Times called "just as powerful a draw" as its theatrical run.

Carrey also starred in The Mask and Dumb and Dumber later in the year. The three films had a total box office gross of $550 million, which ranked Carrey as the second highest-grossing box office star in 1994, behind Tom Hanks. The Hollywood Reporter said before Ace Ventura, Jim Carrey was "seen mainly as TV talent" and that the film's success "firmly [established] him as a big-screen presence". The film's success also led Morgan Creek Productions to produce the 1995 sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls with Carrey reprising his role.

Author Victoria Flanagan wrote that Carrey's performance "generated cult success for the film among adolescent male viewers". The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it "gained a loyal cult following through frequent TV airings". NME wrote in retrospect that the film was a "cult 1990s comedy".

Critical reception

When Ace Ventura: Pet Detective hit theaters, critics were largely unimpressed. The Los Angeles Times noted that few reviewers were won over by the film, with several accusing it of being mean-spirited, unnecessarily crude, and homophobic. As one biography of Jim Carrey put it, the fans loved him while the critics hated him.

According to Metacritic, which looked at 14 reviews and classified six as negative, five as positive, and three as mixed, the movie earned a score of 37 out of 100, indicating generally unfavorable reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, 48% of 65 critics gave a positive rating, with an average score of 4.9 out of 10. In 2019, the site summed up the consensus: Carrey's twitchy antics and gross-out humor are on full display, which is great for fans of his style but likely unsatisfying for everyone else.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. He described Carrey's performance as if the actor were being timed on an Energy-O-Meter and paid by the calories he burned, portraying Ace as a hyper goon who twists his mouth into strange shapes and plays with language.

Stephen Holden of The New York Times said Carrey delivered one of the most hyperactive performances ever seen on screen, adding that only a child could love the character, which might be the point. He compared the movie's metabolism, logic, and attention span to that of a peevish six-year-old. Holden also noted that the few scenes where Ace communicates with animals hint at an endearing wackiness, but that this is abruptly undercut by the ridiculous plot.

Transgender portrayal

The film's plot involves a former male football player, Finkle, who spends a long time disguised as a female police lieutenant named Einhorn. The way Ace Ventura reacts to and exposes Einhorn as Finkle has drawn criticism for its depiction of transgender people. New Vistas described the negative portrayal, noting that the transgender character was the story's villain, and that characters became physically ill upon discovering they were attracted to her body.

The film also features transphobic actions from the main character, who mocks, degrades, misgenders, and exposes the trans female character's body without her agreement. Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins, writing in Representing Queer and Transgender Identity, argued that mainstream media representation of transgender identity around the year 2000 was scarce, and what existed often framed transgender people as mentally unstable. She identified Ace Ventura, along with The Crying Game, as films that show transgender characters as murderous villains.

In the book Reclaiming Genders, Gordene O. Mackenzie points to Ace Ventura as an example of late-20th-century movies that reveal the transphobia common in many popular American films. Mackenzie highlights the scene where Ace Ventura vomits in a bathroom after learning the woman he kissed is trans, calling it a particularly memorable and openly transphobic and homophobic moment. Farhad Manjoo, writing in The New York Times in 2016, also commented on this scene, stating that at the time, there was little cultural concern about using gender identity for comedy.

Instead, like many fictional portrayals of transgender people from that period, the scene’s main feeling is one of disgust, as if holding one's nose.

Did You Know?

• Rick Moranis, Judd Nelson, Alan Rickman, and David Alan Grier were all considered for or offered the role of Ace Ventura before Jim Carrey was cast.
• The film features a cameo appearance from death metal band Cannibal Corpse.
• In March 2021, a sequel film was in development at Amazon Studios with the screenwriters of Sonic the Hedgehog attached.