Bombarded with two weeks of heavy action flicks, moviegoers in the US got a break as Jim Carrey returned to comedic form in Me, Myself & Irene, which opened at number one two weeks back..Irene comes from Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the brotherly team who wrote and directed 1998's summer hit There's Something About Mary, so audiences should expect the same sort of gross-out humour as in Mary.Unlike recent comedies that are filled with jokes about bodily functions the most memorable gross-out scene in .Mary takes place when star Cameron Diaz mistakes a bodily fluid for hair gel the brothers Farrelly generally layer a good story underneath their often dirty humour. "I don't think people use the word `mature' with us often," said Bobby. "(But) believe it or not, the first thing we think about is not the laughs, but the characters," adds Peter, "What we want and need for our movies to succeed is for audiences to care about the characters."With Jim Carrey (who built a career using physical humour in films such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the Farrellys' Dumb And Dumber before dramatic roles in The Cable Guy and recent flop Man On The Moon) in the lead, .Irene looks to be a certain hit at the box-office.Carrey's most recent comedy, Liar, Liar raked in over $181 million at U.S. box-offices, and .Mary was 1998's fourth highest grossing film with about $176 million.In .Irene, Carrey portrays a Rhode Island state trooper Charlie Baileygates, who is the nicest guy around. So nice, in fact, that his beautiful wife leaves him for another man, an African American limousine driver only about three feet tall. She also leaves Charlie with three sons fathered by the limo driver, who grow to be big, black, highly-intelligent men as opposed to Charlie's thin, white, simple-minded character. When Charlie can no longer stand the humiliation from family, co-workers and strangers including a girl jumping rope and when he runs out of medication, he assumes an alter-ego, Hank, who is as mean as Charlie is kind. Problems arise when Charlie is assigned to escort female fugitive Irene Waters, portrayed by Renee Zellweger, and both Charlie and Hank fall in love with her.Working on the film, incidentally, sparked the real-life and ongoing romance between Carrey and Zellweger.
