The Cable Guy

Whether Carrey's fans will like it or not, the film is easily his best crafted piece of work to date. [14 June 1996, p.22]

Lou Holtz Jr.'s script is a clever, half-serious indictment of television. Read full review

To watch Carrey leering with joy at the prospect of making respectable people guess dirty words, and Broderick trying to avoid the whole thing, is to enjoy their best comic synergy. Read full review

The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics. Read full review

Never mind that it doesn't always work or that the film's two halves never quite mesh. The Cable Guy essentially is a genie escaped from a bottle, except that the bottle is a TV screen. [14 June 1996, p.59]

If nothing else, The Cable Guy will make you think twice before trying to pick up a free movie channel. [14 June 1996, p.C]

Is Carrey funny? Of course, because Stiller and the script allow him to be funny, at the expense of tension. [14 June 1996, p.3]

The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose. Read full review

The Cable Guy works best as a movie about how damn hard it is tell someone that you’re really not interested in getting to know them better. Read full review

Ben Stiller directs Lou Holtz Jr.'s script with plenty of unsettling edge, and Carrey throws himself into his part as if it meant something. Read full review

The Cable Guy might not please fans looking only for Carrey's usual shtick, but from here, it looks like a step toward adulthood. [14 June 1996, p.5G]

As The Cable Guy progresses, its psycho-comedic tone gets sicker and its plot more predictable, until, by the end, we may as well be watching Ray Liotta as The Cop From Hell or Marky Mark as The Boyfriend From Hell. It's strictly generic, by the book, and downright exhausting. [14 June 1996, p.03]

It's possible to make a successful comedy about stalking, or virtually any other subject. But you probably need a lighter touch than young director Ben Stiller (Reality Bites) exhibits in this occasionally funny, sometimes grim movie. [14 June 1996, p.3E]

Poor Ben Stiller can't distill the darkness, slapstick and fantasy into a consistent directorial tone, but the leads' expert give-and-take make the movie far from unbearable. [14 June 1996, p.1D]

The mix of light comedy and really quite dark themes proved too much for many viewers, but this is worth a look for Broderick's performance and Carrey's obsessive touches. Read full review

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen. Read full review

It can't risk real pathos, or real horror, and still be a Jim Carrey movie, so the most it achieves is a kind of unsettling creepiness. Strange movie: Carrey is working his gifted butt off, and we're not allowed to laugh. Read full review

Carrey knocks himself out trying to make The Cable Guy different, then neglects the quiet, telling moments that would make it real. Read full review

Aiming, perhaps, for a neat double helix of black humor and prankishness, they've ended up with a pretty ugly granny knot. Read full review

In all, about a third of the film (most of it contained in three extended sequences) is audaciously funny and genuinely disturbing. The rest will sorely test the devotion of Carrey's fans. Read full review

Carrey’s character lacks the empathy or poignance to command ongoing interest, and Broderick’s role strains one’s patience because he’s hopelessly dimwitted and slow to react in any way vaguely resembling human behavior. Read full review

The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough. Read full review

A grating and sinister comedy on the dangers of television. This mean-spirited marriage of cautionary tale and thriller-satire follows the increasingly vicious antics of a deranged cable installer who stalks a preferred customer. Read full review

Writer Lou Holtz Jr. and director Ben Stiller (who has a funny cameo as an accused killer) needed to make the film scarier, turning Cable Guy into a veritable demon. Instead, they vacillate between comedy and attempted thrills like a TV set with a broken vertical hold. [14 June 1996, p.1E]

Not funny enough to be a successful comedy and not coherent enough to be taken seriously, the latest film to star the talented Jim Carrey is a baffling combination of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Cape Fear, a misguided attempt to extend the actor's range by having him play someone who is demented and dangerous. Read full review

In his directorial debut, comedian and Flirting with Disaster star Ben Stiller struggles to filter out a coherent story line around a fibre-optic-thin plot line and the expansive, anarchic comic talents of Jim Carrey. Too often the movie ends up lost in the snow and static between two films fighting for the same bandwidth. [14 June 1996, p.C1]

A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice. Read full review

The Cable Guy doesn't know when to pull the plug. Much of the film plays like a personal boob tube with Carrey trapped inside, determined to act his way out in a mugging freak show. He's a disturbing mixture of psychopath and pathetically misguided lonely soul. Read full review