Review: The Mask (1994)

I’m not saying Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask is his best or even his funniest, but it might be the sharpest illustration of his comedic craft. The Mask came out in Carrey’s massive year of 1994, when he starred in three movies that struck gold at the box office, announcing Carrey as a new big league comedy actor. The films were Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (released February 4), The Mask (July 29), and Dumb and Dumber (December 16). What a year! With this trio, Carrey took 90s pop culture by storm. I remember that, pretty soon, Jim Carrey was the favourite actor of every boy at elementary school. People will debate which is the funniest movie, and which is his most memorable performance, but right now if you asked me for an example that best encapsulates Jim Carrey’s comedic talents and techniques, The Mask is it.

Carrey’s Stanley Ipkiss, a total pushover “nice guy” who works at a bank, stumbles upon a strange Viking-era mask that gives him superpowers but which also unleashes the forces of his id. Through some conversations with a TV psychotherapist (played by superdry Ben Stein), the film underscores the Freudian and Jungian themes behind the mask. For example, when the villain, an aspiring gangster Dorian Tyrell (Peter Greene), dons the mask, it visually unleashes his monstrous nature.

None of this should lead you to think The Mask is in any way serious though. This is a full-on superpowered slapstick comedy. The mask turns Carrey’s regular nice guy into “the Mask,” a domineering force of zany, almost limitless, potential. He can create almost anything on demand, from costumes to guns, and can even affect those around him, for example, making a line of cops with guns drawn sing and dance. As the Mask, Carrey becomes a cartoonish super-anti-hero, in a bright green rubbery mask and, usually, a bright yellow zoot suit.

The rubbery green mask that Carrey dons makes his mugging that much more expressive, and the cartoon superpowers the Mask possesses highlights Carrey’s slapstick performance skills as if with lightning. At times, the manic interplay of live action and practical and early CGI special effects to render the superpowers reminded me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1998). Indeed, we learn that Ipkiss is a fan of old cartoons—such as the 1943 animated short, “Red Hot Riding Hood,” a source of inspiration for the film—and Ipkiss’s cartoon fixations seem to shape the style and abilities of his alter ego.

Even setting aside Carrey’s striking, outlandish performance, though, The Mask is a weird movie. It’s based on an indie comic book series published by Dark Horse Comics (created by Mike Richardson), which was known for its horror, humour, and graphic violence. The Hollywood screenwriters soften the material and reimagine the story as essentially a romantic comedy. Regular nice guy gains new abilities and uses them to try to win over the girl of his dreams, but he has to remember who he truly is to actually win her. The setting, Edge City, at times looks like a regular city, while other times it has elements of Burtonesque Gotham City. Ipkiss and his pal Charlie (Richard Yeni) want to go to the Coco Bongo, which is a famous nightclub like something out of the 1940s. The soundtrack has swing numbers—in fact, the film’s success helped revive swing music in the 90s—and one of the centrepieces of the film is a big dance scene between the Mask and the female lead, who is a singer at the Coco Bongo.

This is the time to mention Cameron Diaz, who is the female lead, and who the opening credits literally introduce. The distance of 30 years confirms that Diaz’s first entry on screen goes down as one of the sexiest movie entrances. The script smartly plays with Diaz’s intense attractiveness, setting her up as a femme fatale, which allows for a nice reversal later on. Diaz herself has not just looks but comedic talent, playing against the expectation the film sets up that she is an airhead blonde, a common conventional mold in movies at the time. (Remember that Diaz would go on to have her own big comedy career in the 1990s, culminating in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary.) She starts off as the girlfriend of the bad guy, Dorian, and she manipulates the nice guy Ipkiss in order to secretly video record features of the bank so Dorian can rob it. Diaz sells her song at the club, and she is impressively never overwhelmed by the big cartoonish dance number with a green-faced guy spinning her around like a baton. The success of her performance is key to the film.

I’ll note that Diaz’s sheer sex appeal as well as the narrative emphasis on a romance storyline looks unusual today in a movie that plays for kids just as much as adults. In this sense, The Mask owes more to the earlier approaches to a wide audience of the 1980s—with characters and humour for adults alongside that for kids—than it points to later family fantasies.

After three decades, The Mask remains memorable for Carrey’s wild cartoonish performance, Diaz’s electric introduction to audiences, and, lastly, for being a good example of the 1990s Hollywood interest in exploiting indie comics for blockbuster fare. Yes, Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies were big hits throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, and from 1989 onward Hollywood had Batman movies. But before Hollywood became totally consumed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which made superheroes first and foremost a movie genre), the 90s gave us a string of curious, sometimes creeky, sometimes solid adaptations of non-DC/non-Marvel comics and pulp. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990, The Rocketeer in 91, The Shadow in 94, Judge Dredd in 95, The Phantom in 96, to name a few. I haven’t revisited them all yet, but I’ll tell ya, The Mask earns a revisit.

7 out of 10

The Mask (1994, USA)

Directed by Chuck Russell; screenplay by Mike Werb, based on the series by Dark Horse Comics; starring Jim Carrey, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene, Amy Yasbeck, Richard Jeni, Ben Stein, and Cameron Diaz.

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