Jim Carrey plays Ace Ventura, a private detective in Miami who rescues animals and gets mocked by the Miami Police Department for it. When the Miami Dolphins’ bottlenose mascot, Snowflake, is stolen from the stadium before the Super Bowl, publicist Melissa Robinson hires him to get the dolphin back.
Tom Shadyac directed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and wrote the screenplay with Jack Bernstein and Carrey. Warner Bros. released it on February 4, 1994. Morgan Creek Productions made it for $15 million. It grossed $72.2 million in the United States and Canada and $35 million elsewhere, for $107.2 million worldwide.
The reviews were generally unfavorable. The film scored 48% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Snowflake, Ronald Camp and the Amber Stone
The plot runs on a chain of clues that keep snapping. Ventura finds an amber stone in Snowflake’s tank and suspects Ronald Camp, a billionaire who collects exotic animals. At a party at Camp’s mansion he searches the property and narrowly escapes a shark. Then he spots Camp wearing a 1984 AFC Championship ring with an amber stone just like the one from the tank — and rules him out, because Camp’s stone is intact.
So he suspects a member of the 1984 Dolphins team. Every championship ring checks out undamaged. The trail dies there, and the film never gives the audience a reason to care that it did.
Roger Podacter, the Dolphins’ head of operations, falls from his apartment balcony. Police call it suicide. Ventura decides it was murder, which is the one piece of detective work in the film that lands.
Ray Finkle and the Missing Field Goal
The answer is Ray Finkle, a former placekicker who joined the Dolphins midseason and missed the game-winning field goal in the team’s Super Bowl loss. Finkle blamed quarterback Dan Marino, threatened to kill him, and was committed to a psychiatric facility. He escaped and vanished.
Ventura travels to Finkle’s hometown and confirms the history and the obsession with revenge against Marino. Before Ventura can return to Miami, Marino is kidnapped. Ventura and Robinson then break into the facility from which Finkle escaped and find a newspaper clipping.
Dan Marino plays himself. Courteney Cox plays Melissa Robinson, Sean Young plays Einhorn, Tone Loc plays Emilio, and Noble Willingham plays Riddle. Death metal band Cannibal Corpse shows up in a cameo.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director | Tom Shadyac |
| Writers | Jack Bernstein, Jim Carrey, Tom Shadyac |
| Runtime | 86 minutes |
| Budget | $15 million |
| Worldwide gross | $107.2 million |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 48% |
What the Box Office Bought
Here is the strange part. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a bad mystery and a worse comedy, and it made $107.2 million on a $15 million budget anyway. The tagline admits the joke: “He’s the best there is! (Actually, he’s the only one there is.)” That is the whole movie — a detective with no method, solving a case by accident.
Carrey’s performance is the reason any of it works. It is also the reason the film found a cult following among male adolescents, and the reason it launched his film career. The sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls followed in 1995, an animated series ran from 1995 to 2000, and Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective arrived in 2009 as a standalone made-for-television sequel.
None of that makes the original good. The shark escape, the stakeout at the Dolphins’ facility, the balcony fall — they are set pieces, not scenes, and the film moves between them without building anything. The mystery resolves by coincidence rather than deduction, and the movie treats that as a punchline rather than a turn.
What the film actually has is Carrey at full volume in a role that lets him do nothing else. The cult following is real. The franchise is real. The movie underneath them is thin, and the 48% is fair.
4.8 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
