Here's an idea for a new Jim Carrey movie. For part of the film, he's a sad sack, and for the rest of it, he's a manic idiot. At the end, he learns a valuable lesson and gets the girl. I'm pretty sure he'll be pretty good in the role, as he's played that exact same character in The Mask, Me, Myself & Irene, Liar Liar, and Bruce Almighty. Oh, wait. Never mind. It looks like Yes Man just came out, and it seems that all the writers did was change the title of Liar Liar and take out the witty and funny bits.

"The movie's premise is not far from that of 'Liar Liar,' one of Mr. Carrey's biggest hits of the mid-'90s, in which he played a chronic dissembler suddenly compelled to tell the truth," writes the New York Times's A.O. Scott. "That film was a philosophical tour de force compared with this one, which arrives at the startling conclusion that while saying no to everything is bad, saying yes to everything is not ideal either."

The New York Daily News also wasn't fooled, suggesting that "if you own the superior 'Liar Liar,' you might as well stay home and watch it again."

"The comparison to Liar Liar is automatic," notes the Tri-City Herald. "But Yes Man is missing the frenzied energy and the four or five gut-busting bits."

Variety comes in with basically the same complaint: "In the spectrum of Jim Carrey vehicles, 'Yes Man' hews closest structurally to 'Liar Liar,' offering the rubber-faced comic actor plenty of opportunities to riff—but with far too few moments that approach the explosive hilarity of that earlier movie."

And it's not like Liar Liar was some sort of cinematic masterpiece; it earned mediocre reviews when it came out over a decade ago. Maybe it's time for a new shtick.

Related in Gelf
In the latest edition of the Blurb Racket, Gelf picks apart an ad used to promote Carrey's new film.

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