CREDIT: UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Harry and Lloyd are back, but the sequel anything but a hit. Stick to watching the original if you can.

Twenty years ago, two incredibly stupid friends won their way into our hearts, showing kindness and earnestness with no motive or complicated scheming. Now, they are going on a road trip to manipulate some poor girl into donating a kidney, lying and stealing their way across the country.

Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel to the hit ‘90s comedy Dumb and Dumber, has many problems, starting with the abrupt change in the personalities of the characters. In the first movie, Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) were incredibly stupid, but they were also kind and generally good people. They refused to steal even when they easily could have, replacing money with well-intentioned IOUs, and they went out of their way to help other people. Lloyd was especially sympathetic, adding a hopeless romantic angle that demonstrated a respect for women, commenting often on how wonderful and intelligent his love interest, Mary Swanson, was.

All of this, all of the good aspects of the characters that drew the audience in and gave them a reason to care about what happened to them, is completely thrown out the window in this horrible sequel.

Instead, Lloyd and Harry come across as being not dumb but willfully ignorant, cruel and dishonest, stealing vehicles, making racist remarks and treating women as – at best – objects to be insulted or lusted after. Any good that was in the characters is removed, making them detestable fragments of the much more developed people they used to be. Every other individual in the movie is sadly one-dimensional, generally filling one stereotype or another, with the women being left to fill such glamorous roles as Pretty Bimbo, Conniving Gold-digger and Shameless Slut.

The depressingly poor quality of Dumb and Dumber To wasn’t limited to the recreations of the characters but spread to every aspect of the movie. The writing was depressingly bad, with every hammered in plot point being a poorly constructed excuse for terrible one-liners or overused dick jokes and had no internal consistency whatsoever. There were also multiple editing failures, as items that were taken away in one scene magically reappear in perfect placement in another.

The biggest mystery is how the movie managed to get a PG rating, which – for context – is the same rating that was attached to Big Hero 6. With the large number of sexual references, the swearing, and the actual showing of testicles, one would think the rating would be a bit higher than that of the newest Disney movie.

This is not a child-friendly movie, and under no circumstances should anyone watch it, let alone allow their child to.

With poor writing, poor acting and poor direction, there is much left to be desired, and many of the jokes are, at best, awkward and alienating. If you prefer to leave your nostalgia goggles on and remember Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as fresh-faced, naive men who dreamed only of doing the right thing, Dumb and Dumber To is not the movie for you.