Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a 1994 American comedy film starring Jim Carrey, who plays Ace Ventura, an animal detective who is tasked with finding an abducted dolphin who is the mascot of the US football team Miami Dolphins. The film was directed by Tom Shadyac, who wrote the screenplay with Carrey and Jack Bernstein. Bernstein and Bob Israel (ultimately a co-producer for the film) developed the project for almost six years. The film co-stars Courteney Cox, Tone Loc, Sean Young and former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino. The film features a cameo appearance from death metal band Cannibal Corpse.

Plot
Ace Ventura is an eccentric, and very unorthodox, Miami-based private detective who specializes in retrieving tame or captive animals. However, he struggles to pay his rent, and is often mocked by the Miami Police Department, led by Lieutenant Lois Einhorn, who finds Ventura insufferable. Two weeks before the Miami Dolphins are to play in the Super Bowl, their mascot, a bottlenose dolphin named Snowflake, is kidnapped. Melissa Robinson, the Dolphins’ chief publicist, hires Ventura to find Snowflake.

Searching Snowflake’s tank for clues, Ventura finds a rare triangular-cut, orange amber stone, which he recognizes as a part of a 1984 AFC Championship ring. Ace suspects a billionaire, Ronald Camp, may have stolen Snowflake. Ventura and Melissa sneak in to Camp’s party, Ventura mistakes a shark for Snowflake and is nearly eaten. Camp apologises, shaking Ventura’s hand, with his hand wearing a ring with an amber stone identical to the one Ventura found. Ruling out Camp, Ventura concludes that a member of the 1984 Miami Dolphins line-up may have kidnapped Snowflake, and will be able to identify the culprit by their rings. However, he discovers all of the team members’ rings are intact.

Roger Podacter, the team’s head of operations, mysteriously dies after falling from his apartment balcony. Einhorn declares it a suicide, but Ventura proves it to have been murder. Ventura comes across an old photograph of the football team, discovering an unfamiliar player named Ray Finkle, who was only added in during midseason. Finkle missed the field goal kick at the end of Super Bowl XVII, which cost the Dolphins the championship, ruining his career.

Visiting Finkle’s parents, Ventura learns that Finkle fully blames Dan Marino for the end of his career, and was subsequently committed to a mental hospital for homicidal tendencies. Marino is kidnapped himself shortly after. Ventura visits Einhorn, pitching his theory that Finkle kidnapped both Marino and Snowflake in an act of revenge, since the dolphin has been given Finkle's old team number and a goal trick to boot. He also theorises that Finkle murdered Podacter. Einhorn compliments Ventura and kisses him.

Ventura and Melissa go to the mental hospital, the former posing as a potential patient, where he uncovers a newspaper article in Finkle’s possessions about a missing hiker named Lois Einhorn. Ventura realises that Einhorn is in fact Finkle: Finkle used the fact that the actual Einhorn was missing and presumed dead (with no body found), and took on her identity, had surgery to change his gender, and began a career with the Miami Police Department to eventually get revenge on Marino and the Dolphins. On Super Bowl Sunday, Ventura follows Einhorn to an abandoned yacht storage facility where she has Marino and Snowflake held hostage. Einhorn calls the police, framing Ventura for the kidnappings. Melissa and Ventura’s friend, police officer Emilio, stage a hostage situation to get the police to listen to Ventura.

Ventura strips Einhorn of his clothes to expose his failure to completely change her sex, but fails until Marino points out a bulge in the back of his underwear, actually Finkle’s unchanged privates hidden out of view. This confirms that Finkle murdered Podacter after the latter had discovered Finkle’s secret. Einhorn is arrested by the police after attacking Ventura, and Finkle’s ring is identified to have a missing stone. Marino and Snowflake are welcomed back during half-time at the Super Bowl in a match between the Dolphins and the Philadelphia Eagles. Ventura tries to retrieve a valuable albino pigeon, but it is scared off by the Eagles’ mascot Swoop, causing Ventura to attack him in retaliation.

Transgender portrayal
Since the film was released, there has been some discussion over the way in which it portrays transgender people. Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins wrote in Representing Queer and Transgender Identity that mainstream representation of transgender identity at the turn of the 21st century was limited, observing, "The representations that did exist tended to pathologize transgender people as mentally unstable." Perkins said Ace Ventura along with The Crying Game depicted "transgender characters as murderous villains". In the book Reclaiming Genders, in a chapter focusing on transgender identity, Gordene O. Mackenzie references Ace Ventura as an example of turn-of-the-century films that "illustrate the transphobia implicit in many popular US films". Mackenzie describes the scene in which Ace Ventura retches in the bathroom, following the revelation that the woman he had kissed is trans, as "one of the most memorable and blatantly transphobic/homophobic scenes". In The New York Times in 2016, Farhad Manjoo also writes about this scene, "There was little culturally suspect then about playing gender identity for laughs. Instead, as in many fictional depictions of transgender people in that era, the scene’s prevailing emotion is of nose-holding disgust."