Review: I Love You Phillip Morris DVD

STUDIO: Lionsgate | DIRECTOR: John Requa and Glenn Ficarra | CAST: Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann, Rodrigo Santoro
RELEASE DATE: 4/5/11 | PRICE: DVD $27.98, Blu-ray $39.99
BONUSES: commentary, making-of featurette, deleted scenes
SPECS: R | 98 min. | Comedy | 1.78:1 widescreen | DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1/Dolby Digital 5.1 | English and Spanish subtitles
RATINGS (out of 5): Movie | Audio | Video | Overall

Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor discover each other in I Love You Phillip Morris.

I Love You Phillip Morris, a darkly comic movie based on a true story, finds star Jim Carrey (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) giving his finest performance in years, which is reason enough to consider picking up this DVD, although it’s definitely not for every one.

Directed and written by those guys who inked the original screenplay for Bad Santa, I Love You Phillip Morris tells the story of Steven Russell (Carrey), a Virginia-born man who became one of the most wanted men in Texas after engineering a succession of undeniably brilliant con schemes and prison escapes … all to impress his naïve lover Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor, The Ghost Writer), who Russell met during one of his brief prison stints.

The film unspools in an episodic flashback framework narrated by Russell, and it moves along quite nicely, abetted by the modulated energy of Carrey. The former Ace Ventura, shines in the role of Russell, whose scheming goes as far as faking his own terminal illness to engineer a jail break.

Carrey’s flamboyance works perfectly in this character, particularly in the earlier, er, “gayer” scenes, where he comes out (much to wife Leslie Mann’s shock), moves to South Beach and embraces his unleashed — and expensive! — lifestyle with his first lover (Rodrigo Santoro of TV’s Lost).

McGregor, an under-appreciated utility actor if ever there was one, slips easily into his less-demanding but no less vital role as the mild, kind-hearted love of Carrey’s life.

It’s rare for the deleted scenes to be the most valuable bonus feature on a DVD, but that’s the case with I Love You Phillip Morris. The disc has seven excised scenes in all (totaling about 17 minutes), and they’re all worth checking out, particularly two extended ones that play up to Carrey’s acting abilities. One scene offers an alternate take on the death from AIDS of Carrey’s first lover, and another finds him romancing Phillip on the high seas as a tempest descends on them. The sequences were probably cut in the name of time (that’s usually it, isn’t it?), but both are good character pieces and worthy of inclusion. There are also a couple of shorter, lighter scenes that were probably cut because Carrey goes a little too far with his trademark physical schtick, which we guess he couldn’t reel in for every scene.

The making-of featurette is perfectly fine and has a funny piece of business revolving around McGregor and Carrey shooting their first of many kissing scenes.