THE CABLE GUY 1996
53%
Directed by Ben Stiller
Written by Lou Holtz Jr.
Starring Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann, Jack Black
Synopsis
A needy, cartoonishly energetic cable installer desperately tries to forge a friendship with a new client, an everydude whose life is quickly turned upside down and sabotaged.
Why We Love It
It’s smart. It’s dark. It’s side-splittingly, stupidly funny. It’s, dare we say, downright prophetic. So how did this Jim Carrey vehicle conjure a collective meh from American audiences upon release?
Let’s call it too much of a good thing. When The Cable Guy hit theaters in 1996, comedy It boy Carrey was pretty much omnipresent at the box office. In the two years leading up to The Cable Guy, he starred in—deep breath—Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. That’s a lot of Carrey’s rubber-face antics to endure in such a short amount of time, so we can forgive the groans from the public and the movie’s reputation as a pricey dud in the years that followed. (During an episode of The Simpsons, Homer literally rips apart the screenplay at a Planet Hollywood–type restaurant, shouting “Stupid script! Nearly wrecked Jim Carrey’s career!”)
What we can’t forgive, however, is writing off this gem decades later. Originally penned for fellow larger-than-life onscreen presence Chris Farley, the project went through several drafts, with director Ben Stiller, producer Judd Apatow, and Carrey (who nabbed a $20 million payday) eventually whipping the story into a comedic psychological thriller, a sort of Cape Fear with dirty jokes. Carrey’s performance as a TV-addled stalker is nimble in retrospect: full-on adrenaline one minute, subdued (but equally ridiculous) sincerity the next. As the object of Carrey’s bromantic affections, Matthew Broderick tempers the insanity with an always-straight-laced portrayal.
Well, almost always: during a scene in which Carrey does his best Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, you can see signs of Broderick breaking into laughs off-camera. The pop-cultural nods don’t stop there: minutes after that Lambs riff comes a nifty recreation of a fight in a 1960s Star Trek episode. Elsewhere, references to everything from Gimme Shelter and Midnight Express to My Three Sons and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (very meta) abound.
It all adds up to a high-octane skewering of a generation lost in TV and technology, with a supporting cast (Jack Black, Leslie Mann, Owen Wilson, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Janeane Garofalo) that’s like a who’s who of about-to-break talent. So maybe folks didn’t get what Stiller and co. were after back then. (Roger Ebert dubbed it “an exercise in hatefulness” while counting down his list of the worst films of 1996.) But twelve years later, Stiller may have had the last laugh: his satirical spoof Tropic Thunder was instantly beloved.