When we first meet Ace Ventura, played by Jim Carrey, it’s hard to discern him from a typical package delivery man… Just kidding. Ace takes no pride in this work, intentionally crushing the package in the doors of an elevator and kicking it down a hallway like a soccer player, because it is merely a ruse for his true profession: Pet Detective. After delivering the now-beaten box, he recovers a puppy in the first pet rescue of the movie. The stakes for his next rescue are set higher.

Snowflake, the Miami Dolphins mascot, has gone missing! They were ‘dolphin-itely’ stolen, but who would do something as heinous as this on ‘porpoise’?! Of course, the timing of this dolphin-napping couldn’t be worse (merely two weeks before the Miami Dolphins are set to host the Super Bowl). To rescue the dolphin in time the head publicist for the team, Melissa Robinson, hires Ace. Melissa, played by Courtney Cox, accompanies him on his hunt for clues. While searching, he finds a tiny orange gem in Snowflake’s tank which he miraculously is able to identify as the stone belonging to a 1984 AFC Championship ring. This leads him to his first suspect, but after a run in with a literal shark, Ace learns it can’t be him. Instead it must be a member of the 1984 Miami Dolphins as they would be the only other people to have such a ring.

Eventually, the clues lead Ace Ventura to discover a lesser known Dolphins player named Ray Finkle who ruined his career by missing an easy kick, costing his team a Super Bowl victory. After further investigating the former player, he learns that he developed homicidal tendencies and was committed to a mental hospital. With this knowledge, Ace suggests that Finkle was behind the dolphin-napping (and Dan Marino-napping, even though his jurisdiction is mostly animal) to Lieutenant Lois Einhorn. She thanks him for the suspect and tells him that the police department will take the case from there, but he does not give up. Soon, Ace finds a newspaper discussing a missing person with the same name as the Lieutenant and realizes that Finkle took Einhorn’s identity. Einhorn was the kidnapper all along.

Therein lies the problem with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It falls into a common trope among older media of having the only portrayal of a transgender person, if there is one at all, as a villain and somebody with psychological issues. In doing so, it causes the audience to associate transgender people with wrong doing and being in an improper mental state, feeding into transphobic beliefs.

Outside of the ending, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a fun and enjoyable movie – that is if you’re the type of person who can jive with Jim Carrey’s physical humor. If not, ‘alrighty then.’ For me, this movie is a classic that I’ve seen many times since my childhood. I’m thankful that as I’ve grown up, I was able to see its flaws though. Critics have also found flaws in the movie which resulted in its middling 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. In spite of this, I would still recommend Ace Ventura if you have never seen it.

http://https://youtu.be/cXcH0f2B2vA