In Dumb and Dumber, a maniacal half-wit dreams of being surrounded by a large, adoring audience of average Americans, who embrace him as a genius and laugh themselves sick at his infantile jokes. Jim Carrey was merely pretending to be a maniacal half-wit, of course. But it’s useless to pretend he doesn’t share the half-wit’s dream. In all of Carrey’s movies, there comes a point—usually about every five minutes—at which everyone else onscreen simply retreats to the back of the frame and watches Carrey go into his patented hipster-spaz act, a violent, unstanchable spew of pop-culture references and movie reenactments. It isn’t exactly a stand-up routine, where someone gets up and tells jokes. It’s as if someone plonked a TV set in front of the other actors and jammed the remote on permanent surf.

Like Robin Williams’ amphetamine free association, Carrey’s comedy is impossible to imagine without the sensation of changing channels—the jarring, disorienting disruption of mood and subject matter. A half-century of flipping from sitcom to shoot-’em-up has primed us for his arrival. Add commercial interruptions (product placement!), and he’s a one-man basic cable package.

So there’s a germ of inspiration in casting Carrey as The Cable Guy, a manic cable installer who longs to make a personal connection with one of his many customers. If TV is a drug, Carrey’s cable guy, who calls himself Ernie “Chip” Douglas and worships a giant satellite dish, is definitely a dealer strung out on his own product. He’s always looking to turn someone else on—which is why he readily supplies a preoccupied yuppie executive named Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) with unlimited free cable.

From all appearances, Steven could use a friend. His job is stressful, his boss is an arrogant prima donna, and his girlfriend Robin (Leslie Mann) has dumped him because he asked her to marry him. (A friend calls him “the mad smotherer.”) But the freaky, clinging cable guy isn’t the pal Steven needs. He forces Steven to become his buddy, turns Steven’s apartment into a karaoke den, and insinuates himself into Robin’s good graces. And when Steven tries to disconnect himself from his newfound companion, the cable guy proves to be an even more formidable enemy.

There are several promising ideas in The Cable Guy, which provides a modest number of laughs before its nerve peters out. The best idea has nothing to do with television: It concerns the casual, dismissive way we treat service providers, whom we often (at best) engage in solicitous conversation for as long as it takes them to complete the task. (That the cable guy ultimately has no name other than his function is right on target.) The opening scene, in which Steven politely tries to get his cable with as little personal contact or involvement as possible—only to be undone by his dithering attempts at small talk—is both funny and unsettling, a worst-case scenario of backfiring civility. The mixture of cartoon volatility and innocent conversations that turn menacing hints at something truly original—Bugs Bunny chasing Elmer Fudd across one of Harold Pinter’s treacherous verbal minefields.

But the movie’s much-ballyhooed dark humor quickly turns into What About Bob? staged in storms and shadows. (The term “black comedy” seems to have been taken literally.) Jim Carrey has the most nakedly aggressive comic style in movie history: At his most assaultive, with his eyebrows waggling, his body contorted into a hepcat curlicue, and his line readings belted out Ethel Merman-style, he makes Jerry Lewis look downright bashful. The decision to emphasize the malevolence in his speed-freak slapstick has merit, and Carrey is definitely game: The scene in which he glares into Broderick’s peephole and hurls himself against the door in impotent fury makes your skin crawl even as you laugh. (My skin crawled during Ace Ventura too, but I didn’t laugh.) Nevertheless, the movie can’t decide whether the cable guy is an object of hilarity, pity, or fear, and the lack of focus sends Carrey (de)scrambling like mad to hold his character together.

Carrey’s cable guy is meant to represent the harmful effects of nonstop TV viewing: An embarrassing dime-store-Freudian flashback shows the young cable guy sitting neglected in front of the tube. (The same premise is used more effectively on the wickedly amusing Fox melodrama Profit.) What’s strange is that the same channel-surfing comic style Carrey used in Ace Ventura and The Mask is now held up as evidence of a personality disorder. The anti-boob-tube grandstanding smacks of self-loathing—though not necessarily Carrey’s.

Both Carrey and his director, Ben Stiller, graduated from half-hour sketch-comedy TV series, where they built careers on parodies of movies and TV shows. On Stiller’s often inventive The Ben Stiller Show, the incessant pop-culture in-jokes and movie references were part of the fun; at the show’s weakest, they were the only fun. Like so many former television employees, Stiller now blames TV for the world’s ills. But his notion of a TV-damaged world isn’t even as sophisticated as The Ben Stiller Show: The oppressive lighting and showily “dark” production design are strictly movie-of-the-week. (Having the film’s TV and movie references—My Three Sons, Midnight Express—explained to us is an added insult.)

Not surprisingly, it’s the moments that have the least to do with television that provide the biggest laughs: a grim parlor game of “porno password,” in which the miserable Steven has to give his mother clues for “vagina”; a visit to a medieval-themed restaurant staffed by Ben Stiller regulars Andy Dick and a sublimely surly Janeane Garofalo. Stiller loses any goodwill earned by those scenes, however, with a witless concluding fight scene and an unbelievably sanctimonious wrap-up: a shot of a man without television suddenly discovering the joys of...reading. If Ben Stiller wants to drive people away from visual entertainment toward literature, movies as drab, unfocused and hypocritical as The Cable Guy ought to do the trick.—Jim Ridley

Stone Cold

The premise of the new hit movie The Rock is almost irresistible. A cadre of disgruntled Marines (led by Ed Harris) has captured a group of tourists at Alcatraz; unless the government coughs up million-dollar benefit packages for the families of abandoned covert operatives, they’ll bomb San Francisco with nerve-gas missiles. Attempting to avert this disaster are Nicolas Cage, an offbeat FBI chemical weapons specialist, and Sean Connery, a British special agent who is the only man to have escaped from the legendary prison. Their mission: infiltrate Alcatraz, remove the guidance system from the missiles, and free the hostages.

This is such a can’t-miss premise—full of the promise of combat action and prison-break adventure—that it would take a complete dolt to mess it up. The Rock has just such a dolt in director Michael Bay, a former music video and TV-ad director whose previous film, Bad Boys, played like an extended, profane Mountain Dew commercial. Bay, working from a much-rewritten script credited to David Weisberg, Douglas S. Cook, and Mark Rosner, takes what should have been great fun and makes it heavy, oppressive—rock-like, if you will.

Let’s start with the plot (since none of the filmmakers did). If Ed Harris’ general really wants to draw attention to the plight of the abandoned veterans, why doesn’t he alert the press? How does Sean Connery’s spy steal sensitive microfilm in 1962 that contains the secret of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination? Why does Nicolas Cage spend the climax of the film trying to disable the guidance system of a missile that has already launched and splashed harmlessly into the ocean? And what, in Eisenstein’s name, is the purpose of the violent 10-minute car chase through the streets of San Francisco?

These are nitpicky gripes, yes, and in the average action film, such lapses might be acceptable. They might’ve been acceptable in The Rock too, if not for the style in which the half-baked script is shot. Bay overdoses on the quick-cut, close-up, inexplicable-light-source style perfected by Richard Donner and Tony Scott, only he adds a crude new touch: As cars race down the street or men tumble on the ground, Bay jerks the camera forward and backward in eye-bugging fashion. The technique is literally nauseating, and it renders much of the action incomprehensible. Where is the hero? Where is the villain? Where are they in relation to each other? More to the point, where is the director?

In the final analysis, it’s neither the plot nor the style that crumbles The Rock. It’s the movie’s tone, which takes egotistical masculine paranoia to an absurd, embarrassing low. This is the last film from the producing team of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson, who made their reputation with pumped-up action movies built around communities of hammer-headed men. The Rock is particularly men’s-clubby, full of sexist comments, racist caricatures, anti-government cynicism, and ill-considered military sentiment (plus a wimpy homosexual hairstylist, just for grins). There’s not one unconditionally likable character in the movie—not even Nicolas Cage, who gives an interesting performance full of tics and unexpected line readings (with goofball dialogue that he reportedly scripted himself); by film’s end, he’s been made into a brutal thug.

Judging by the stacks of money that The Rock has made in the past two weeks, the filmgoing public isn’t bothered by the movie’s fascistic elements. I wish I could join the throng and enjoy The Rock as a boisterous star-studded shoot-’em-up. Instead, it just seems like an unsavory joke made by a bully. The Rock doesn’t make your blood race; it makes you feel like a collaborator.—Noel Murray