Ripping Yarns

The Green Id of the Nineties

I keep thinking about the version of this movie we almost got. When New Line Cinema first grabbed the rights to Dark Horse’s *The Mask*, the plan was apparently a gory, splatter-punk horror thing in the *Nightmare on Elm Street* mold. And sure—read the comic and it tracks. A cursed wooden mask that strips away morality and turns some poor guy into an unstoppable, violent maniac is pure slasher fuel. But Chuck Russell watched Jim Carrey turning himself inside out on *In Living Color* and pivoted. The nightmare wasn’t the blood. It was the idea of a living, breathing cartoon with zero brakes.



So you get this 1994 oddball sitting right in Carrey’s legendary run, sandwiched between the fratty gross-out of *Ace Ventura* and the road-trip stupidity of *Dumb and Dumber*. And somehow it’s still the one I rewatch most. What hits me now is how physical everything feels. People love to bring up the early CGI—and yeah, it was a big deal—but it lands because it’s riding on a performer who already moves like he’s made of rubber. Greg Cannom’s green makeup was built to keep Carrey’s face readable, not drown it. When the jaw unhinges and the eyes bug out, the computer’s mostly just pushing what Carrey is already doing with his body.

That blend of sweat and effects is never better than the movie’s most contagious set piece: “Cuban Pete.” A squad of cops has him surrounded, and he doesn’t throw punches—he spreads the sickness. Maracas appear, the beat kicks in, and before you know it the whole precinct is stuck in a conga line. The escalation is perfect. Carrey sings and shimmies like a vaudeville performer trying to dance away the gallows. Then Russell pulls the camera back and it’s just a wall of blue uniforms kicking in sync. It’s absurd. It should be unbearable. But the movie commits so hard to the Tex Avery DNA that you end up going with it.



What makes all that chaos hit, though, is Stanley Ipkiss under the paint. He’s a bank teller who’s basically trained himself to take up as little space as possible. Carrey gives him that slumped posture and the apologetic little voice. (He’s said he modeled Stanley’s gentle, beaten-down vibe on his own father.) There’s real sadness in Stanley’s pre-mask life. He clings to old cartoons because in those worlds the underdog finally gets to drop the anvil. The mask doesn’t hand him a brand-new personality—it just turns the desires he’s been swallowing for years into a weapon. He’s lonely, and he wants to be seen.

And the movie sees him. It also can’t stop looking at Cameron Diaz, making her debut as Tina Carlyle. It’s still kind of wild to remember she was a model with no acting experience walking into this. She enters the bank drenched from the rain in that red dress and the film practically freezes. Roger Ebert clocked it instantly in 1994, calling her “a true discovery in the film.” She isn’t just doing femme fatale; she finds a way to play on Carrey’s chaotic wavelength while still feeling warm and real.



It’s not perfect. The mobster plot—Peter Greene’s Dorian Tyrell and company—feels like it wandered in from a flatter, grimmer crime movie. Any time the story leaves Stanley behind to deal with casino-heist logistics, the movie deflates a little. And the third act drags. If that stuff bugs you probably comes down to how much you can stand those very nineties, studio-action climax gears grinding into place.

But *The Mask* holds up in spite of the dated corners. It gets at the real itch behind the superhero fantasy. It’s not always about saving the world. Sometimes you just want the nerve to dance with the prettiest person in the room, tell your lousy landlord off, and—just once—be the loudest guy there.