Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls was probably the peak of Jim Carrey’s unmitigated weirdness before he fully crossed over into the mainstream – and that’s really saying something. Whereas the original Ace Ventura had a fairly cohesive narrative and set of characters, this plays more like a collection of skits, a series of out-takes or a fractured emanation of Carrey’s unhinged comic mind. Ace himself is also less of a character this time around and more an expression of pure id, a force of chaos that anticipates Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered as much as Carrey’s own subsequent career. From moment to moment there’s little continuity, just a series of weird, zany and grating gestures, such as when Ace tortures a prisoner into talking by scraping a knife and fork across a ceramic plate, and then pressing his own eyeball as far into his skull as possible. There is only the broadest of narrative outlines, a kind of parody of the pan-African early 90s in which Ace travels to Africa to rescue an albino bat for a tribe, and along the way discovers that we are all Africans – and, more specifically, that we are all African animals, all birthed of the fauna of the mother continent.
Like the first film, then, When Nature Calls is obsessed with the human animal and the moment at which this inner animality breaks through the surface of Carrey’s face. Ace feels most at home with animals – we’re treated to a montage of him hanging out with lions, hippos and monkeys – and often seems on the verge of becoming (or regressing to) animality himself. In one of the best set pieces, he spies on a pair of suspects by installing himself inside a mechanical rhino, but any distinction between his body and that of his disguise quickly breaks down when the interior fan stops working. Plagued by the intensified heat of the savanna, he strips off his clothes, starts to hallucinate, resorts to animalistic body movements and maniacally tries to push his way out of the backside of the mechanical rhino, leading a local safari guide to assume that the creature is giving birth, and to misrecognise Ace as its baby.
Yet whereas Carrey’s inner animality arose from relatively urbane settings in the first film, here it takes place exclusively against “wild” backdrops, meaning that the comic contrast between Ace and his surroundings is replaced by a more emergent and ambient sense of weirdness. Traditionally, Carrey’s comic style has always worked best when his distinctive craziness comes to the surface of a relatively naturalistic character – think the impact of The Mask, the transitions of Liar Liar or the electrifying jolts of The Cable Car – to the point where this eruption, and Carrey’s efforts to repress it, are what constitute his screen personality. In When Nature Calls, even the most residually naturalistic substrate is entirely removed, meaning that Ace’s weirdness never ramifies against any kind of norm, and so feels both less and more strange than in the original film. Like Mr. Bean, he seems to exist in a reality of all his own, except unlike Mr. Bean the baseline of reality is already so compromised that comedy often segues into a broader surrealism that seeks to shock, provoke and outrage as much as amuse, in keeping with the “video nasties” of the time that valorised sensation above all else.
In other words, When Nature Calls is essentially oneiric in nature, so it makes sense that the only genuine crossover between Ace’s world and the real world comes when he’s caught pleasuring himself in an African hut. As he simultaneously arrives at the moment of climax and tries to repress it until his intruders have left, his facial expressions briefly make sense as naturalism, and feel halfway commensurate to the actual situation he is in. For the rest of the film, he has a kind of resting oneiric face that means the best sequences tend to occur when it’s just him in the scene, whether talking to himself, sleeptalking, or talking to others purely for his own amusement. The rest is a kind of ejaculatory aesthetic that suffuses the film with the whole body shock, chaos and jouissance of humankind’s first climax, which is treated as a biological curiosity as much as a salacious source of comedy. Seminal motifs percolate through the plot, which ends up revolving around a British conspiracy to export guano, and filter into Ace’s aspirations, which he summarises as a quest to achieve “total spiritual creaminess.” While When Nature Calls may lack the Cannibal Corpse soundtrack of the original, this sticky sickly aesthetic does start to anticipate a certain kind of nu metal grossness that made its way into late 90s comedy, most notably in a fight scene that sees Ace buried in sand, banged against a drum, and speared in the leg bones against a clearing scattered with lurid skeletons.
As an attempt to visualise humanity’s first howl of orgasm, When Nature Calls also provides Carrey with an extraordinary CV of everything his face can do – and especially his mouth. Insofar as the film has a rhythm, it emerges out of the increasingly bizarre ways that Carrey orients his mouth to the rest of his face, and from there to the faces and spaces around him. We open with him vomiting food back into a baby bird’s mouth, and then move to a panoply of oral gymnastics that involves licking and spitting out a plane meal, creating a face-mask out of fruit at a diplomatic party, coughing up as much phlegm as possible as part of an African ritual (“it’s the mucus that unites us”), accidentally eating guano and then painstakingly wiping it off his tongue, sticking out his tongue to lick his love interest’s tongue, proving his masculinity by reaching his whole fist into an African man’s mouth to retrieve an apple core, throwing a punch at a rival only to find his fist caught in his opponent’s teeth, and then being dragged across the ground by the mouth by this same warrior. It all comes to a head in the final chase sequence, when the camera hones in on Carrey’s mouth, the manic soundscape briefly sinks into silence, and we’re encouraged to wonder at the sheer intensity of his oral mechanics, the symphony of muscles that allow him to contort his lips in shapes previously unknown to man. And then he opens his mouth once more, in a primal scream that cements When Nature Calls as the strangest (and possibly the purest) expression of Carrey’s comic id, his fascination with what sociobiologist David Barash described as “the whisperings within.”