A Not So Surprising Reason Millennials Are Going After 1994's Ace Ventura
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) was not exactly a high-brow film.
Even though it was a moderately big success at the time, kickstarted Jim Carrey 's career and launched a small franchise, there may be plenty of reasons not to like its brand of comedy – frankly, the majority of it is gross, childish or just plain stupid, often saved only by Carrey's talent.
However, some people managed to find a bunch of entirely new reasons to condemn Ace Ventura.
First and foremost, the scene related to the discovery that a character named Ray Finkle, who has been portrayed as a man throughout the film, is actually transgender and now goes by the name Lois Einhorn, and flirted with the titular character before.
Upon finding that he actually kissed a transgender, Ace Ventura reacts with comically exaggerated disgust, including vomiting buckets, pumping his throat with a sink plunger, showering multiple times, and crying to the song "The Crying Game" while in the shower.
Needless to say, the transgender rights activists are not especially amused by the implication of a character finding transgenders more revolting on the instinctive level than animal excrement.
As Farhad Manjoo wrote about this scene in The New York Times in 2016, "There was little culturally suspect then about playing gender identity for laughs. Instead, as in many fictional depictions of transgender people in that era, the scene's prevailing emotion is of nose-holding disgust."
The fact that Finkle/Einhorn was a murderous villain also drew its share of ire from the same quarters.
Other accusations towards the movie included having jokes related to mental illnesses (at one point of the movie Ace Ventura pretended to have a mental health condition so that he could infiltrate a mental hospital in search of Finkle) and even animal cruelty, even though finding stolen or missing animals and being preternaturally good in communicating with animals was Ace Ventura's whole schtick.
Well, as Jim Carrey himself acknowledged, this movie would not have been likely to be made today. And if it somehow was, it would have stirred quite a storm.