Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls landed in theaters on November 10, 1995, as the second installment of the Ace Ventura franchise and the follow-up to 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Jim Carrey returned as the pet detective, this time hunting a missing bat in a fictional East African country called Nibia. Warner Bros. released it through Morgan Creek Productions. Steve Oedekerk wrote and directed, and he was a close friend of Carrey’s who had also worked on the first film as a character consultant. What he delivered runs 90 minutes and spends most of them mistaking noise for jokes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
A Raccoon Falls and a Detective Quits
The film opens with Ace failing to save a raccoon from falling to its death, a parody of the movie Cliffhanger. The failure breaks him. He joins a monastery in Tibet and sits meditating while the monks around him try to live with his antics. Then the African explorer Fulton Greenwall arrives, having heard about the raccoon’s death, and tells Ace there is a job waiting in Africa. The Monastery’s Abbott, desperate to be rid of Ace, tells him he has achieved enlightenment and should leave with Greenwall. Every monk celebrates his departure.
The job is Shikaka, the sacred white bat of the Wachati tribe. The Wachati are peaceful. Their rivals, the Wachootoo, are more savage and intense. If the bat is not returned within a few days, the two tribes go to war. If it is returned, the Wachati princess marries the Wachootoo prince. That is the entire engine of the plot, and it is thin enough to see through.
Jim Carrey Commits and Nobody Else Can
Carrey does what Carrey was paid to do in 1995. He talks in voices, he contorts, he commits. The problem is that the material gives him nothing to aim at. Ace must overcome his fear of bats. That is the character arc. A man who talks to animals is afraid of one animal, and the movie treats this as a revelation.
Ian McNeice plays Fulton Greenwall, the explorer who drags Ace to Nibia, and he is the closest thing here to a straight man. Simon Callow plays consul Vincent Cadby, the British official Ace meets on arrival. Sophie Okonedo plays the Wachati Princess, who has a crush on Ace and wants to seduce him. Maynard Eziashi plays prince Ouda. Tommy Davidson, who co-starred with Carrey on In Living Color, makes a cameo as the Tiny Warrior.
Bob Gunton appears as Burton Quinn, owner of the Quinnland Safari Club. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays Hitu. Danny Daniels is the Wachootoo Witch Doctor, Sam Phillips the Wachootoo Chief, Damon Standifer the Wachati Chief, Andrew Steel a character named Mick Katie. It is a large cast for a movie that gives almost none of them a real scene.
A Feather, a Dart, and a Case Nobody Solves
Ace investigates Shikaka’s cage in secret, because the Wachati forbade outsiders from setting foot on the altar. He finds a raven feather and deduces that Quinn, the safari club owner, played a role. He interrogates Quinn and learns that someone already beat Quinn to the punch. After he leaves the safari, an unseen hunter shoots darts at him until he passes out.
Ace is brought back to the Wachati and revived by Greenwall, Ouda, and the princess. They tell him the darts were poisoned. That is where the source material trails off, and honestly, it is where most viewers will have checked out already.
Here is the thing about the mystery: it does not matter. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had a case with a payoff. When Nature Calls has a bat, a feather, and a dart, and it treats the solution as an afterthought to the next bit. The film is 90 minutes long and it still feels like the plot was written on the back of a napkin between set pieces. A detective comedy needs a detective story. This one has a costume.
Where the Comedy Stops Building
There is a version of this movie that works. Carrey in 1995 was the most physically gifted comic in America, and Oedekerk had already proven he understood the character. The Tibet sequence has a real idea in it: a man so broken by a dead raccoon that he retreats from the world, and a monastery so sick of him that it lies to get him out the door. That is a joke with structure. It builds, it pays off, and it uses the monks as a chorus instead of as props.
Then the film gets to Africa and stops building. The Wachati and Wachootoo are not characters. They are a backdrop for Carrey to bounce off, and the movie asks the audience to care about a wedding and a war it has not bothered to make real. The princess wants to seduce Ace. The chief has children who were taught English by missionaries. These are facts, not people. The comedy has to come from Carrey alone, and no performer, however gifted, can carry 90 minutes on his own without a script that gives him a partner, a target, or a turn.
The sequel also loses the thing that made the first film work: a mystery with a human villain and a reason to keep watching. Here the villain is a raven feather for most of the runtime. The darts come from nowhere and hit a man we already know is the hero. There is no tension, because there is nothing at stake that the movie has convinced us to care about.
What $212.4 Million Actually Proves
The film was even more financially successful than the previous installment. It earned a total of $212.4 million at the box office against a budget of $30 million. That is a staggering return, and it is the single most important fact about this movie’s place in history. Audiences in 1995 wanted Carrey, and they got him. They did not get a movie around him.
The reviews were mainly negative. Metacritic sits at 45 out of 100. That split is the whole story of the franchise. Carrey’s star power could open a movie and carry it to nine figures. It could not make the movie good, and by the time the credits roll, the gap between what the ticket buyers paid for and what they received is the only interesting thing on screen.
It is worth saying plainly: a $212.4 million gross against a $30 million budget is not evidence that the film works. It is evidence that the first film worked, and that Carrey’s name on a poster in 1995 was worth more than any script. The sequel cashed a check the original wrote. That is a business outcome, not an artistic one, and the two should never be confused when we talk about what a movie actually is.
A Franchise That Froze Instead of Dying
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is the second installment of the Ace Ventura franchise, and it is also, for practical purposes, the last one that mattered. The first film introduced the character and the world. This one repeated the formula with a bigger budget and a foreign setting, and it made more money. Then the series stopped being a series of films and became a series of references.
That is the real cost of a sequel like this. It does not kill a franchise. It freezes it. The character becomes a set of catchphrases, the premise becomes a costume, and the next installment, if there ever is one, has to rebuild from nothing because the second film spent all the goodwill the first one earned. When Nature Calls is not a disaster. It is a withdrawal.
Release Order and Running Order
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1994 | Ace Ventura: Pet Detective released |
| November 10, 1995 | Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls released by Warner Bros. |
| 1995 | Runtime: 90 minutes |
| 1995 | Budget: $30 million |
| 1995 | Box office: $212.4 million |
| 1995 | Metacritic: 45/100 |
By the Numbers
- Title: Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (also known as Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls)
- Release date: November 10, 1995
- Studio: Warner Bros., produced by Morgan Creek Productions
- Director and writer: Steve Oedekerk
- Runtime: 90 minutes
- Budget: $30 million
- Box office: $212.4 million
- Metacritic: 45/100
- Genres: Crime, Comedy, Adventure
- Tagline: “New animals. New adventures. Same hair.”
- Score: 4.5 of 10
Our Verdict on Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is a 90-minute movie with a strong first act and almost nothing behind it. The Tibet sequence understands the character. The Africa sequence does not understand anything except that Carrey is funny and the camera should point at him. The mystery is a feather and a dart. The supporting cast, from Ian McNeice to Sophie Okonedo to Bob Gunton, is given nothing to do but stand near the star and wait for him to finish.
The film made $212.4 million against a $30 million budget, and that number will be used forever to argue that it worked. It did not work. It sold. Those are different things, and the difference is the entire lesson of the 1995 sequel boom. Carrey was the biggest comic in the world, and this movie is the clearest evidence that even the biggest comic in the world needs a script. The tagline promised new animals and new adventures and the same hair. It delivered the same hair, and not much else.
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