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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Watching The Mask again after many years is quite a trip down a long and winding nostalgic lane. Back to a time when Jim Carrey was just becoming a household name, and no one even knew the name Cameron Diaz. An era when CGI was in its infancy, and the limitations of its implementation were still being tested. A time capsule of the early 1990s casually stepping into the realm of comic book movies, most of which were abysmal failures like the 1990 Cannon film release of Captain America, or utter abominations like the 1997 Shaq-ting excretion known as Steel. The Mask is a movie many millennials grew up quoting, referencing, and revisiting throughout the years whenever that bug for our childhood memories happened to bite, and that itch just needed to be scratched. But the question is: Does this 1994 Oscar-nominated romp, tailor-made for Jim Carrey's cartoonish persona, still hold up today as more than an amusing curiosity that showcased the potential for CGI?
Hell. Fricken. Yes.
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Not only does The Mask function as a laugh-out-loud comedy, but it's also a fairly engaging crime thriller, banking on Carrey's ability to illicit our sympathies as Bugs Bunny's green-faced humanoid embodiment of Hitchcock's Everyman. The early scenes of Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey), a banker working thanklessly in a position of just another anonymous tie-wearing desk jockey, bring a surprising amount of depth to the film's very colorful canvas (shot beautifully by future James Wan collaborator, John Leonetti). We see him as an outsider in his own element, encouraged but ultimately upstaged in his personal life by his buddy Richard Jeni, who strikes out just as much as Stanley, but is at least willing to shoot his shot. Then one day Cameron Diaz walks into his life for the first time, stunning Stanley and the audience in equal measure just by being there, and his life takes that fateful first turn toward the hero's journey. Along the way, he'll run into Zed from Pulp Fiction, who put Tina (Diaz) up to the whole ruse at the bank as a pretense for planning a heist. The elements all fall into place at a natural but brisk pace, and then director Chuck Russell pulls the rip cord and lets Jim Carrey loose as the titular character.
It's in those moments, when Carrey is able to utterly cut loose, that The Mask rises above simply being "good," and becomes truly magnificent. As the eponymous Mask, Stanley winds up in two different worlds of trouble: On one side, the local police are suspicious of him, because lying comes about as naturally to Stanley Ipkiss as chastity comes to a Kardashian. On the other side, Zed doesn't like some green-faced son of a bitch horning in on his action or his woman. In a moment of true vulnerability, Stanley confesses that the magical relic brings his "inner-most desires" to life, as if feeding adrenaline to the cartoon-obsessed hopeless romantic, and transforming him into a "love crazy wild man." Of course, succumbing to your every want and need without thought to consequence means that inevitably you'll fall victim to those same unfettered desires, and hurt those you care about the most. This is a theme that many of Carrey's movies have covered, such as Bruce Almighty. The result in The Mask is the only truly dark turn the movie takes toward the tone of its source material, which culminated in a scene that was deleted from the final cut, but makes it to home video on this flawlessly transferred UHD set from Arrow Video.
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This movie has never looked better than it does now. I remember seeing it in the theater as a kid, and the quality is practically night and day. There's not a speck of dust on the transfer, the grain levels are perfect, and the comic book style visuals truly sing with the color timing bringing out deep purples and greens in the palette. The visual effects also hold up super well, with the exception of that first closeup of the mask morphing around Carrey's head where you can practically see the 1's and 0's, but all is forgiven after that yellow tornado spins to a stop and we get that iconic line: "Sssssmokin'!" And it's just the first of many, many quotable lines. If it weren't for this being released the same year as Pulp Fiction, I would say it's the most quoted movie of 1994, but second place ain't bad when you're in the company of champions.
While many of the early "special effects movies" after Jurassic Park faded into obscurity, The Mask endures to this day as a classic, made timeless by its stylistic production design, and the way its wacky script by Mike Werb embraces many of the tropes of classic Hollywood that were considered extinct by 1994. Not many live action movies in that decade took a break for musical interludes, let alone two, and even fewer packed them with this much humor and energy, using CGI to push the boundaries of imagination and truly blend cartoon physics with the real world. And in the center of it all, you've got two star-making performances from Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz, who have off-the-charts chemistry like Bogart and Bacall, and manage the impossible task of grounding a movie with its feet firmly floating three feet off the pavement.
Will I be buying this new release of The Mask? Somebody stop me.