Monitor: Tasteless, filthy and very funny - 'Something About Mary' as seen by the world's newspapers

IT'S daft, it's shameless, it's borderline offensive, yet there's something about There's Something About Mary I found bizarrely endearing.The Farrellys' new film is a rollicking, no-holds-barred carnival of tastelessness. It doesn't so much ridicule sacred cows as flay them, griddle them and serve them up on a bun with extra fries. Its scattergun approach leaves nowhere to hide - women, gays, the disabled (or "retards" as they are called), sexual taboos, skin rashes, leg braces, all are grist to the film's sick-joke fun machine. Oh, and dog lovers should also be warned.

- Anthony Quinn, Mail on Sunday

SOME people are saying that it will change the way we think about political correctness. Well, some people are wrong. It'll change nothing ... Already a $100m hit, it will spawn imitations, probably dumber and dumber ones. But the political contrariness of Mary won't switch society's points and send us all careering along a different line. It's simply about stupidity, stupid! Like a student's rag mag, or graffiti on a wall, it certainly tells us what the kids are up to. Their usual filthy things.

- Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

Why bother to list the myriad offences given by the proudly obnoxious new film by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, when it's easier - definitely much too easy - to enjoy them? The film works ridiculously well because it never stoops to being mean-spirited or (despite all appearances) authentically inane. The Farrellys display a crazy audacity that's worth admiring, and they take sure aim for the funny bone. The film may be many things, but dull and routine aren't among them. It takes a welcome touch of the bizarre from the presence of Jonathan Richman, once of the Modern Lovers, appearing troubadour-style in peculiar settings (up a tree, at a hot- dog cart) to sing about Mary and her magic.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times

CRITICS are supposed to be immune to bad taste, but this is as bad as it gets. You wouldn't expect discretion, subtlety or anything politically correct from the makers of Dumb and Dumber, and you don't get it. The gross-out humour here includes Stiller getting caught in his zip; Dillon giving mouth-to-mouth to Diaz's long-suffering dog; Stiller masturbating prior to his big date; and all sorts of jokes at the expense of retards, cretins, the handicapped and the disabled. Funnily enough, the one thing the Farrellys don't find funny is Mary. Hair gel apart, Diaz is gamely reduced to playing straight gal throughout.

- Time Out

I'M AN old guy (58) who changed at least 1,000 dirty diapers when my three kids were babies because I was a fully participatory dad. I still find some poop jokes extremely funny. At times I, too, lament the passing of what appeared to be kinder, more gentle times, but to tee off on a comedic movie as an example of what has caused our passage from there to here is barking up the wrong tree. Would there be oral sex jokes everywhere if Monica and Bill Clinton hadn't created the farce to begin with? To shed crocodile tears over the sad state of film art when a comedy makes a joke about a boy getting himself caught in his zipper is pretty comical in itself.

- Ray Lewis, New York Post

It certainly seems to have intensified Hollywood's appetite for lowbrow fare, including an Austin Powers sequel called The Spy Who Shagged Me. There are times, however, when it seems little more than a naughty schoolboy's Nineties' makeover of the kind of screwball comedy that Hollywood produced in the Sixties when Katharine Hepburn could lose her dress, Cary Grant could lose his dignity and there were a lot of animal jokes about a leopard called Baby.

- Allan Hunter, Scotland on Sunday