Even if you understand motion picture studios have always milked a franchise whenever they saw the chance, sometimes you still have to ask why. If a movie is popular enough, especially a comedy, a studio is bound to follow it up with a sequel or two. Warner Bros. followed up 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective with 1995’s Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and then a 1996 animated TV series. The animated series might have been pushing the envelope but Warner Brothers has gone even further with 2009’s straight-to-video entry, Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective. Original star Jim Carrey doesn’t appear; instead, we have young Josh Flitter in the title role. This one is strictly a kid flick.
It seems ol’ Ace got married to the woman he met in the original film, Melissa (played originally by Courteney Cox and this out by Ann Cusack), and they had a child, Ace Jr. But then Ace Sr. disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle following some sort of animal. As a result, Jr. never really got to know his dad. Ace’s mother has raised the boy in Orlando, Florida; working in a zoo to support them.
Ace Jr. is twelve, and like father, like son. Despite his mother’s attempts to get young Ace to ignore animals, he’s drawn to them. Like his father, Ace feels the need to investigate missing ones. We are clued into the fact that this kid is just like his dad when he wakes up one morning and finds his hair flipped up and to the side. His mom is bothered but she knows there’s not much she can do.
At school, Ace is the go-to-guy when one of them loses a pet; he can always be trusted to bring them home safe and sound. The entire girls’ swim team asks him to find their missing mascot; an alligator named Mr. Chompers, and threaten to throw him in the pool if he doesn’t. Of course, the young man feels the pressure but since it’s his destiny, what are you going to do.
Everything is going pretty well, until one day when a real disaster strikes. The zoo’s panda, Ting-Ting, goes missing, and Agent Russell Hollander (Art LaFleur), the head of the National Bureau of Fish and Wildlife, comes in with a full SWAT team to arrest Melissa. Though he has flimsy evidence against her (she works at the zoo!) Hollander takes her in. It’s now up to Ace Jr. to find the panda and get his mother out of jail. In the meantime, Ace’s grandfather (Ralph Waite), Ace Sr.’s dad, comes to take care of him and it becomes clear that finding pets runs in the family.
That in a nutshell, is the story. While Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective may appeal to toddlers and very young children, it’s doubtful the films appeal goes much beyond that demographic. The story is much too simplistic and lacking action to keep the interest of many children, even though it has a relatively short run time of 93 minutes.
The Warner engineers reproduce the movie’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio using an anamorphic transfer, which captures most of the film’s visuals pretty well. Colors are bright and most often reasonably deep, although faces show up a bit too darkly. Definition is merely so-so, but it’s helped a lot by the vividness of the hues. Nevertheless, the image can look somewhat soft and sometimes blurred.
Like the video, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is up to the task at hand, as long as one understands that the film doesn’t call upon the soundtrack to do a whole lot beyond reproduce dialogue and background music. It does so with the use of occasional rear-channel voices and musical bloom. The midrange is realistic enough, but don’t expect much in the way of frequency extremes or dynamic impact.
The bonus materials begin with a gag reel lasting about four minutes, followed by a sequence of five extended scenes lasting about five minutes. Then there are six brief featurettes, the titles of which are self-explanatory: “Ace and His Animals,” “Ace Ventura Jr.: The Inside Story,” “Austin and Emma,” “All Play and No Work,” “Now Introducing…the Animals,” and “Ox the Dog,” each lasting from two-to-five minutes.
The extras wrap up with sixteen scene selections; several trailers at start-up only; English as the only spoken language; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.
