In the nineties, between Forrest Gump and Jack Sparrow, there was a trend to build movies around off and slightly dim goofballs. But writing such a character is difficult, and if you miss the mark even by a little, you end up with a protagonist who is an insufferable asshole. And the writers of Ace Ventura: when nature calls missed the mark so much they moved back to Germany. As a consequence, Ace Ventura, a detective specialised in pets and animals, is unbelievably obnoxious. And yet I sat through this whole movie, because in the climax he visits the local consul and finds him sitting at a chessboard.
The plot of the movie is that the holy bat of some African tribe has disappeared and a war looms on the horizon. The consul we find at the board has called in Ventura’s help to find it back.1 After stringing together an impressive list of mishaps and incessantly pulling faces, he has finally come up with a theory — and that theory leads him back to the consul.
And he catches him in a highly compromising position — this one: 3
And the consul has just played b6 to arrive here! I admittedly have some minor doubts about the position of black’s e-pawn and perhaps white’s queen is on e4 instead, but everything else is correct. Surely this is going to start an immense diplomatic conflict! Usually, there’s already a whole hullabaloo when a foreign company is pumping poison in the water supply or a when there are a couple of simple political assassinations, so what fury would a position like this unleash?
Yet somehow Ventura makes it worse: he takes the white king in hand and uses it to capture the black king. Do you see what I meant when I called him an insufferable asshole?4 The fact that animals help him all the time is perhaps the biggest strike against nature as a whole.
Realism: 1/5 Not only b6 is laughably stupid, but also the move before that: either white left his knight completely undefended, or — perhaps even worse — he just straight up hung it.
Probable winner: White. He has mate in one. If he’s feeling a little sadistic, he could even take on a8 and make his opponent suffer a bit more.
1. [Probably because he’s batshit crazy.2] ↩
2. [The ‘he’ in this sentence could be either the consul or Ace Ventura — both interpretations work.] ↩
3. [Ace diagram editor.] ↩
4. [I propose we call him Double Fault Ventura from now on.] ↩