Before Jim Carrey was zipping around as the mustachioed Dr. Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehoghe was caught in a web of his own honesty in the 1997 laugh riot Wild Wildnow streaming on Prime Video, and honestly, it might be the most Jim Carrey that Jim Carrey has ever been. Directed by Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura), Wild Wild stars Carrey as Fletcher Reede, a morally bankrupt lawyer who uses lies the way most of us use oxygen. But when his fed-up son Max (Justin Cooper) makes a birthday wish that his dad can’t tell a lie for 24 hours, Carrey is in a whole world of trouble, in what might be one of his most quotable movies alongside Dumb and Dumber.
Outside of Carrey and Cooper, the cast also includes Maura Tierney as Audrey, Fletcher’s ex-wife, Cary Elwes as Jerry, Audrey’s overly nice new boyfriend, Jennifer Tilly as the hilariously scheming Samantha Cole, Fletcher’s client with a dodgy case, and Anne Haney as Greta, Fletcher’s long-suffering assistant who gets a front-row seat to his total emotional collapse.
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Wild Wild was a box office smash, grossing over $302 million worldwide on a $45 million budget. The film also earned Carrey a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical, presumably for the fact he spends an entire 90 minutes with his face made of rubber and elastic, or the fact he spends a full scene beating himself up in a bathroom to try and avoid getting out of court.
Speaking of that scene, Carrey — speaking in an interview to promote the movie at the time with Bobbie Wygant — revealed that the bathroom scene was meant to be even more “demented” before it was reined in.
“We went into the scene and I think the script says something like ‘he beats himself up’ [laughs] so we just went into that room about a week before and looked around and I thought, I need to slam my head into the toilet and we played with it and came up with physical bits. There was a lot more to it, actually, but it just got demented [laughs]. That was a one day shoot, that was a one day shoot I think, and it was painful, it was really painful! I went home and had to count my bruises.”
Wild Wild is on Prime Video now.
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Fletcher Reede, a lawyer whose success is built on his ability to lie convincingly, is suddenly forced to face the truth when his son Max wishes that he could not lie for one day. The wish comes true, and Fletcher finds himself unable to tell even the smallest fib. This inability to lie comes at the worst possible time, as he is in the middle of an important court case and struggling to repair his relationship with Max and his ex-wife, Audrey.
- Director
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Tom Shadyac
- Runtime
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86 Minutes
- Writers
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Paul Guay
