The Quarantine Stream: Let ‘The Cable Guy’ Make You A Preferred Customer Again
By Ethan Anderton/May 9, 2020 10:00 am EST
But Carrey isn’t the only one who makes this worth watching. Matthew Broderick, who was once the face of carefree fun in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off makes for the perfect hapless ex-boyfriend. Broderick’s descent into paranoid madness in the wake of his friends and family embracing Carrey’s deceptively friendly Cable Guy Who Is Never Really Named is one of only a few good big screen roles in the 90s, along with The Lion King and Election.
The rest of the supporting cast is filled out with the likes of Leslie Mann as Matthew Broderick’s ex-girlfriend, George Segal and Diane Baker as his parents, Jack Black as his good friend, Owen Wilson in one of his early douchebag roles, and even some bit parts for Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, David Cross and Kyle Gass. And let’s not forget Ben Stiller in a recurring side plot unfolding on TV as twin brothers Sam and Stan Sweet, one dead and one on trial for murdering the other, modeled after the real life Menendez Brothers who captured headlines and audiences in a sensationalized trial.
That latter part creates a rather hamfisted moral that is anything but subtle, but the movie overall isn’t subtle either, so it all works pretty well. Even the end leans into the camp of it all by giving a kind of Twilight Zone conclusion with a fun twist that takes us right back to the beginning of a new story. All-in-all it’s a truly unique entry in the careers of Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, and it deserves to be talked about and remembered nearly 25 years later.
