The Cable Guy

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