Not all movies are good ones, as Jim Carrey knows. Despite some major hits with The Mask and The Truman Show, the comedic actor turned to a serious role in 2016 with Dark Crimes. It quickly proved to be a mistake.
This had nothing to do with Carrey’s acting abilities. There was a lot wrong with the thriller. So much so that it came out with a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it sits on the list of one of the worst movies ever made at No. 11. It goes down as one of the lowest-rated films Carrey has done in his career, and he’s a man willing to take risks.
Dark Crimes was based on a true story, adapted from the 2008 New Yorker article by David Grann, “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery.” The story follows an author, Krystian Bala, who writes a novel that closely follows an unsolved murder. As the police delved into the details, they realized he was writing from experience.
To step away from his usual comedy, Carrey took on a completely different persona to play the role of Detective Tadek, a grim Polish investigator. Not only did he grow a heavy beard, but he also adopted a thick Eastern European accent, but it performed so poorly at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2016, where it premiered, that it struggled to gain distribution, leading to a straight to VOD release in May 2018.
The beard certainly had people talking! After filming wrapped in late 2015, Carrey decided to keep his beard, and that led to a lot of conversation when he appeared as a presenter in January 2016 for the Golden Globes.
While critics reacted negatively to the movie itself, it wasn’t Carrey’s performance that put them off. In fact, one reviewer shared, “Dark Crimes is a film that doesn’t work with a performance that actually works pretty well.”
Another even said, “Carrey shows that he has real dramatic chops, but this is a crime thriller served cold.”
The topic of dark times and grief came up while on the press circuit, and Carrey shared how he handles it all, sharing, “I think it all leads to something beautiful eventually, so that’s kind of the attitude I come to it with. I allow myself to fall in the river of grief if that’s presented itself and get banged off the rocks until I’ve learned something and become a more well-rounded human being because of it.”
If you do want to check out Dark Crimes to create your own opinion on the film, then it is available to stream on Netflix.
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