The 2005 Stinker Son of the Mask is an Unholy Abomination
I have been writing My World of Flops for seventeen years now. Seventeen years! How crazy is that? That is a VERY long time.
I’m not good at counting or math, but I must have written about millions of movies for the column—maybe even billions!
Yet there are still massive flops I’ve never gotten around to writing about because the world of entertainment is so inconceivably vast that it’s impossible to get to everything.
Some movies are so spectacularly unsuccessful that they NEED to be written about. I’m talking about stinkers like 2005’s Son of the Mask.
The film’s failure critically as well as commercially inspired star Jamie Kennedy to make a 2007 documentary entitled Heckler in which he argued, drunkenly and incoherently, that Roger Ebert giving Son of the Mask a negative review because it is literally his job to tell people to avoid movies that fucking suck, is pretty much the same as a blackout drunk dude at a comedy asking to see Jamie Kennedy’s penis.
Kennedy was so hurt that people would be so unkind as to judge The Son of the Mask harshly that he made a whole damn movie about it. Heckler was designed to make critics look like messy, petty little bitches motivated by petty jealousy and reflexive cruelty rather than a sincere love of film. Instead, Heckler made Kennedy look like a messy, petty little bitch motivated by resentment and anger rather than a sincere desire to make people laugh.
Kennedy took the pans he got for Son of the Mask very personally because he felt, not without reason, that critics were attacking him as a person more than they were criticizing the film or his performance.
Son of the Mask is the antithesis of a personal project or labor of love. Kennedy is upfront about being in the movie because he was paid two and a half million dollars for his services. Yet there’s some strange mental block in Kennedy’s brain that keeps him from understanding that he got terrible reviews for The Son of the Mask because it is as close to objectively godawful as films get and not because the evil critics have it out for Kennedy, a simple man who just wants to be paid millions of dollars for subpar work then have critics go easy on him for reasons I do not understand.
Here’s the thing: If a movie is dependent on an actor’s charm and personal appeal, then it becomes a critic’s job to point out that they have no charm and are extremely unappealing. It brings me no joy to report that Kennedy is charmless and also extremely unappealing.
Son of the Mask wants us to laugh at its star. That’s understandable. Son of the Mask is technically a comedy. Jamie Kennedy can very generously and somewhat accurately be deemed a funnyman who ekes out a living, making audiences chortle, chuckle, and tee hee hee. It never succeeds.
Even more disastrously, Son of the Mask wants us to feel for Jamie Kennedy. It wants us to be invested in the emotional journey of a protagonist played by Jamie Kennedy. Son of the Mask has multiple scenes where the music gets all syrupy and sappy, and Kennedy gets a puppy dog expression that conveys that he’s really trying.
In Son of the Mask’s climactic fight, Kennedy leaps up in the air, then farts explosively in antagonist Loki’s (Alan Cumming) face, then earnestly explains to Loki’s mad dad Odin (Bob Hoskins) that “there is nothing more important than your relationship with your family.
Son of the Mask wants to pluck at our heartstrings and unleash a toxic cloud of flatulence in our collective face. It only succeeds in stinking to high heaven.
Kennedy had to star in Son of the Mask to establish indelibly that he is not a movie star. Son of the Mask wants us to laugh at Kennedy and root for him in his spiritual journey to become a better man, father, and husband.
Kennedy stars as Tim Avery, an animator who is reluctant to have children for reasons beyond a moppet head-butting him in the swimsuit area early in the film.
Tim is supposed to be a lovable, relatable everyman we can all identify with and root for, but this is Jamie Kennedy we’re talking about, so we tolerate him at best.
make it stop!
Tim’s gorgeous partner has baby fever, but he’s focused on impressing boss Daniel Moss (Steven Wright) enough to score his own show. Son of the Mask does many things unspeakably wrong. This includes forcing Steven Wright to act instead of letting him deliver every line as flatly and affectlessly as possible, as God intended. That’s because it expects us to be wrapped up in Tim’s professional journey as well as his emotional one. We’re supposed to root for Tim to achieve his creative dreams when it’s impossible to care about anyone or anything in Son of the Mask.
The non-fun kicks off with Tim’s dog Otis finding a green mask that transforms its wearer into a Looney Tunes-style cartoon character. The Mask turns people, babies, and animals into rampaging ids capable of altering the fabric of reality.
When he picks up the mask and wears it, the mask turns Tim into Jamie Kennedy doing Jim Carrey doing Matt Frewer as Max Headroom. Carrey’s rubber-faced lunatic was “smoking,” whereas Kennedy is merely lukewarm.
Tim dons the mask for a work party that is a straight-up snooze until our protagonist leaps onstage to perform an outrageous Hip Hop remix of “Can’t Take My Eyes of You.”
Like the similarly misconceived Blues Brothers 2000, Son of the Mask favors a quantity-above-quality approach to replacing an irreplaceable pop icon. Blues Brothers 2000 disastrously tried to replace John Belushi with a black guy, a kid, and John Goodman. Son of the Mask similarly imagines that Jamie Kennedy, an adorable baby, and a zany pooch will equal one Jim Carrey.
Like everything else, the movie’s arithmetic is off. A dog plus baby plus Jamie Kennedy only adds up to one-tenth of a Jim Carrey.
I’m not sure if Son of the Mask could have made audiences forget Jim Carrey and grudgingly tolerate Jamie Kennedy under any circumstance, but a Hip Hop remix of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” was not the way to go.
They ostensibly cast Kennedy so that he could do his crazy, amped-up Jamie Kennedy shtick in a way that might recall Jim Carrey’s over-the-top shtick, yet he delivers a strangely subdued performance even in green-face Mask mode.
Kennedy should have heeded the show-business maxim to never work with babies or animals since they’re both such natural scene-stealers.
Tim has sex with his wife while wearing the mask. This results in the birth of Alvey, a baby with mask powers.
People who lived through the mid-1990s are all too aware of the existence of the “Dancing baby” phenomenon. This was a horrifyingly ubiquitous GIF of a computer-animated baby boogying in a manner that made you hate babies, animation, and life.
The “Dancing Baby” phenomenon is most associated with Ally McBeal, where it was a physical manifestation of its heroine’s ticking biological clock.
I’m not sure how, but dancing baby technology somehow seems to have only gotten worse between Ally McBeal and The Son of the Mask.
You might think you’re a badass, that you have an iron constitution, and that nothing can frighten you, but you have not experienced true horror until you’ve seen Alvey “dance” to “Hello Ma Baby” exactly like Michigan J. Frog in the classic cartoon One Froggy Evening.
Kennedy is so underwhelming as The Mask that anything seems preferable, but the unholy CGI used to make that baby boogy made me want to stab my eyes out so that I will never again be afflicted with such a sight.
Alvey is pure nightmare fuel from somewhere in the deepest, darkest depths of the uncanny valley. He’s as terrifying as anything in The Shining or the Turle Club sequence in Master of Disguise.
Son of the Mask even makes you hate a cute dog who behaves like a sociopath whenever he puts on the mask.
Son of the Mask has one huge advantage in Alan Cumming. He’s great! Who doesn’t love that guy? Kennedy apparently wanted the Loki role because it’s much juicier. Cumming gets to be a shape-shifting god of mischief who looks fantastic in a wide variety of outfits, while Kennedy is stuck in the thankless role of a bland straight man.
Cumming isn’t the only ringer in the cast. Bob Hoskins apparently thought he was signing on for the voice role of Odin. Hoskins didn’t realize that while most of the role was vocal, he would have to appear onscreen for several minutes, something he seems to be doing under duress.
No movie with Alan Cumming running wild can be completely worthless, but Son of the Mask comes close. It’s no garden variety stinker but rather a fiasco for the ages that lives up and down to its reputation as one of the worst movies and worst sequels of all time.
Son of the Mask ended Kennedy’s career as a cinematic leading man, so at least it accomplished something worthwhile.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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