YMMV / Ace Ventura

• And You Thought It Would Fail: The book Homey Don't Play That revealed it was a running joke on the set of In Living Color how stupid the movie sounded and openly mocked Carrey on how it was going to flop. Carrey got the last laugh, as the film went on to gross $107 million on a $15 million budget, becoming a modest hit and becoming the Star-Making Role for Carrey.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Destructo-Nookie scene between Ace and Melissa in the first movie that seemingly came out of nowhere.
• Broken Base
  • Which is funnier: the first or the second film?
  • Whether or not the "Einhorn is a man!" joke holds up despite its Values Dissonance. Some think its homo/transphobic baseline is enough to make the joke completely fall flat. Others, even people who find the joke offensive on paper, still find it hilarious due to Jim Carrey's complete overreaction.
• Critical Dissonance: The first film was widely panned by critics. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel went as far as declaring that Jim Carrey would never have a career as a movie star (though they'd eat their words after watching him in The Truman Show). But audiences found the movie hilarious, and between it, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber Jim Carrey became the highest paid actor in Hollywood for a while.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Homo/transphobic as it may be, Ace just imploding over the discovery is Einhorn is actually a man until it's clearly meant to be an overreaction saves the joke from being completely unfunny all these years later. Special mention goes to the scene where Ace puts a plunger in his mouth to eject more vomit out his mouth. If helps if you go by Word of God that it's meant to show the irony of how the simple act of kissing a man can destroy someone as badass as Ace, or as a send up of The Crying Game.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Ray Finkle/Lois Einhorn tends to get empathy from people who see them as transgender, mostly stemming from the Reality Subtext of the injustices towards real-life trans people, ignoring the fact that they're also a murderous lunatic who transitioned not because he was a woman who was assigned the male gender at birth, but as a front, which involved taking the identity of a missing hiker, for a Disproportionate Retribution revenge scheme that involved animal abuse and murder.^note For the record, the issue people take with the character isn't so much that they're being made fun of for being transgender, but that they evoke the "trap" stereotype (that claiming to be transgender is allegedly just an excuse for cross-dressers to rape someone under false pretenses), so even if the character is not transgender, that extremely harmful assumption about trans people is still a byproduct of the overall joke of the character. And even disregarding any implied transphobia, the joke of a man getting grossed out by kissing another man can still come off as homophobic, which isn't much better.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Most people would really like to forget that Ace Ventura Jr. even exists.
• Fountain of Memes: Almost all of Ace's one-liners have been quoted frequently since the movie's release.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Ace's "Einhorn is a man!" freakout in light of the Trans Panic defense and several high profile murders of trans women by people who either freaked out on realising they were trans, or tried to cover up a relationship with them.
  • Ace Ventura Jr. has a crazy scientist trying to save "ugly animals", stating that they're endangered as well, but unlike pandas nobody cares about them since they aren't cute enough. One mentioned species is the Chinese Paddlefish... which was declared extinct in 2019 after its last remaining spawning grounds were blocked off by dams, and its decline largely ignored until it was too late, simply because they weren't as "charismatic" as other endangered species like tigers, rhinos and sharks, and thus little effort or attention was given to their conservation.
  • The backstory of the missed field goal takes on a new uncomfortable light following 2019's "Double Doink" incident in which Cody Parkey's game-winning attempt struck both the upright and crossbar on the way to a Chicago Bears loss in the closing seconds of the Wild Card round game. While blame on the kicker himself subsided somewhat after replays ruled that the ball was tipped on approach, the wave of harassment and threats against Parkey afterward can feel eerily reminiscent of Finkle's backstory.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the first film, when Einhorn asks what Ace is doing at the police station, he sarcastically says "I was the second gunman on the grassy knoll." A YA novelization changes it to Ace claiming "I helped the Grinch steal Christmas."
  • You can't help but view Ace's freakout when he discovers that Einhorn is really Ray Finkle in a whole different way after seeing I Love You Phillip Morris (ironically, Ace was at least partially inspired by a character Jim Carrey played on In Living Color! called The Overly Confident Gay Man).
  • Former sports athlete Bruce Jenner would follow in former athlete Finkle's/Einhorn's footsteps 21 years later... as transwoman Caitlyn Jenner.
  • Minnesota Vikings kicker Blair Walsh missed a last second field goal in a 2016 game against Seattle, and was subsequently dropped from the team. Video footage of the field goal in question shows that the ball was held laces-in.
  • Ace getting up close to the camera and doing his best Scotty impersonation would get something of a reprisal at the 2021 Game Awards.
  • Watching Ace making fun out of "The Monopoly Guy" is somehow even better now, when in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) Jim Carrey's Doctor Robotnik looks a lot like Monopoly Guy himself.
  • In Ace's and Melissa's first scene together, Ace is chewing sunflower seeds and leaving the shells all over Melissa's desk. The mess is obviously driving Melissa crazy. Her behavior throughout the whole interaction is perfectly in-character for Courtney Cox's not-too-distant-future role Monica Geller. As is the line where she can't resist correcting her boss when he calls a dolphin a fish. Jim Carrey would later star in Bruce Almighty alongside Cox's Friends co-star, Jennifer Aniston.
  • The first movie ends with a Super Bowl between the Miami Dolphins and the Philadelphia Eagles. In real life, both teams would miss the playoffs that year.
• It Was His Sled: Spoilered for consistency on this Wiki, but: Finkle is Einhorn.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Loo-hoo-zeh-her!^note Jim Carrey reprised the catchphrase in 2020 when parodying Joe Biden's presidential victory speech. No prizes for guessing whom he was referring to.
  • Who doesn't know at least one person in any group of nerds who will always announce "Do NOT go in there! WOOO!" after returning from the bathroom? Or when someone else returns from the bathroom. Or when the bathroom is mentioned.
  • LACES OUT! (specially in every NFL game decided by a missed kick)
  • Briefly "Frankly, that's none of your damn business, and I'll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs." became a catch-all smart-alec answer to any question.
  • Finkle/Einhorn became memetic enough to get their own World of Warcraft NPC.
• Parody Displacement:
  • After Ace Ventura was first released, some moviegoers believed the Mission: Impossible theme (which is used in the movie) originated from it. It was a short-lived effect, fortunately, as Tom Cruise set the record straight two years later.
  • Due to the generally different audiences and how often the other film is likely to be on TV, younger audiences can probably be forgiven for not knowing that the Unsettling Gender-Reveal scene is a fairly direct parody of The Crying Game, even if it did play the song the parodied film is named after.
  • Ace's impersonation of William Shatner in The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" might slip past some younger viewers.
  • Ace's "Damn I'm good" quote was mostly attributed to Duke Nukem than Ace himself.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ace's landlord is Hector Salamanca and his love interest is Monica Geller.
  • The Wachati princess is Sophie Okonedo, who's since become known for her roles in Hotel Rwanda and Skin 2008.
• Squick:
  • In-Universe, this is Ace's reaction to finding out that Einhorn is really Ray Finkle. His resulting Shower of Angst isn't pretty, either, as Jim Carrey probably isn't someone a lot of people want to see naked. There's also the giant wad of gum he chews in the scene after, the result of chewing the entire package all at once.
  • Einhorn/Finkle's comically oversized penis tucked between his/her legs when Ace reveals her secret. The split second we see it is all that's needed to drive home how gross it looks.
• Uncertain Audience: Ace Ventura Jr. was made for children, yet a lot of the humor was too sophisticated for them and unless they were allowed to watch the first two films, they might not even know what or who Ace Ventura even is. Meanwhile, fans who grew up with the 90s films wouldn't want the see it either due to the Sequel Gap and not appealing to what made the other films great (nevermind the lack of Carrey).
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Dolphins' head coach, Don Shula, would retire after the 1995 NFL season, and Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino would retire after the 1999 season.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: All Ray Finkle ever did was miss a field goal. He didn't deserve to have his NFL career ruined and be branded a pariah by his entire hometown, even though he missed. Finkle's parents suffered serious trauma themselves from the fallout, with his father now paranoid to the point of answering the door armed with a shotgun and his mother clearly driven to permanent insanity. Ray Finkle would be a Designated Villain, if not for his lust for murderous revenge against Dan Marino, whom Finkle still blames for everything for supposedly not holding the ball laces out — even if he did, Finkle's willingness to kidnap and kill innocent people for the sake of this revenge diminishes the sympathy for him.
• Values Dissonance: The "Einhorn is a man" gag. Back in 1994 it was, at best, a cheap laugh and at worst juvenile and mean-spirited. But after decades of increased visibility for transgender rights and the "trans panic" defense being seriously called into question, it can come off as outright hateful. Even Tom Shadyac's already questionable defense that the gag was more at Ace's expense (that he's tough enough to catch bullets in his teeth but goes to pieces from just kissing a man) doesn't hold up as well these days. Jim Carrey himself had said as much.
• Values Resonance: Einhorn being played by a cis woman goes directly against the popular belief bandied about by the Gender Critical movement that men cannot become woman no matter how much surgery or hormones they get/take. Ace claiming gender-affirming surgery is effective when dressing down Einhorn pegs him as actually being light years more progressive than the likes of what a JK Rowling or a Dave Chappelle would argue in the modern day.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Between the animal-related plot and Ace himself both looking and behaving like a living cartoon character, it's not too surprising that parents mistook this for a family-friendly film, not learning about the explicitly sexual humor and gender-bending subplot until it was too late. The fact that it later got turned into a Saturday-Morning Cartoon didn't help.

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