The Cable Guy
Wednesday, 9 Feb 2005 13:42
As the title character of THE CABLE GUY (Columbia, PG-13), Jim Carrey thrusts out his jaw and speaks in a sulky, nagging lisp, as if he were Jay Leno’s infantile brother. Has any other performer derived this much joy from acting this undignified? Carrey plays a pathological leech, a cable-TV serviceman, the cable guy, who latches onto a yuppie customer (Matthew Broderick) and convinces himself that the poor sap is his new best buddy. Calling himself Chip Douglas (from My Three Sons, one of the shows that haunt his TV-addled brain), he invades Broderick’s home and office, leaving endless messages on his answering machine, crashing – and I mean crashing – his amateur basketball game, bombarding him with pop-psych homilies on how to win back his girlfriend, and, in general, turning his pursuit of “friendship” into a thinly disguised act of sadistic terrorism.
