10 Misleading Movie Trailers That Totally Fooled You
7. The Cable Guy - This Is Not A Jim Carrey Comedy Movie
A movie staring Ace Ventura and Ferris Bueller, this must be an uproarious comedy! That is certainly the impression you get from The Cable Guy's trailer. Jim Carrey is at his Jim Carrey-est, talking in funny voices and using his ENTIRE body to e-Nun-Ci-Ate every syllable of every wacky line of dialogue he has. Add in a resigned and hopeless Mathew Broderick to play jarringly across from him and you should have the perfect formula to a chalk-and-cheese comedy.
The trailer shows off slapstick scenes of Broderick and Carrey jousting at a medieval restaurant, jumping over people to score at a basketball game and dancing around in ridiculous ways (a Carrey signature). We watch with grins on our faces as Carrey gets Broderick into increasingly awkward situations, including getting him arrested.
But all the comedy in the trailer is lacking some crucial ingredient that the film has in abundance: darkness. Because The Cable Guy is not Ace Ventura 2.0, it's actually extremely dark and disturbing, but in a blackly comic way of course. Nevertheless, audiences flocked to the cinema for a family fun film, and what they got was definitely not that.
In the film Carrey aggressively beats up a man in a restaurant, harasses and stalks Broderick throughout and isolates him from his family, friends and peers. It holds a huge cult fanbase nowadays, but at the time people were shocked and disturbed by movie's surprising tone.