by: Peter Travers 
 
 Held up for over a year because no one could decide if the damn thing was too gay for public consumption, I Love You Phillip Morris finally sees the light of day. OK, the movie, written and directed by John Requa and Glen Ficara of Bad Santa fame, is all over the place. But it's also outrageously funny. Jim Carrey swans around making nutso magic as Steven Russell, a Texas police officer who realizes he is gay, starts cruising rough trade, becomes a con man and ends up in jail where he slow dances to Johnny Mathis with inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a bottle blond bottom in for grand theft auto. They fall hard for one another and Stephen schemes to spring them both from the slammer. It's more complicated than that, but who has the time? So begins a series of escapes, disguises and reunions that defy belief. Stop fighting it. I Love You Phillip Morris is based on fact. Career criminal Stephen is currently serving a 144-year sentence. It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing. There's something about these Marys that pulls you in. 
 
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 That description in the movie’s production notes applies not only to Mr. Russell’s amazing adventures in fraud, deception, multiple impersonation and prison escape, but it also distills the gleefully blasé attitude of a movie that despite explanatory titles doesn’t bother to make you believe that any of it is true. Mirroring Mr. Russell’s fantastic criminal antics, its abnegation of persnickety realism to track its own zany-sentimental orbit is one of its charms. 
 
 Written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (“Bad Santa”), who adapted their screenplay from a book by Steve McVicker, a former investigative reporter for The Houston Chronicle, “I Love You Phillip Morris” plays like a goofy social satire. Aping Mr. Russell’s devil-may-care high jinks, it takes for granted the grifter’s faith in the lawlessness, disorder and potential for larcenous self-invention in an easy-money society that allows brilliant sociopaths to fly high. 
 
 With its star’s transmutation into a slightly milder variation of his standard screen persona, “I Love You Phillip Morris” is a Jim Carrey movie all the way: a good one, I might add. With his manic glare, ferociously eager smile, hyperkinetic body language and talent for instant self-transformation, Mr. Carrey has rarely been more charismatic on the screen. 
 
 Because it is a sexually forthright gay love story, “I Love You Phillip Morris” is also transgressive, at least by Hollywood standards. From the moment Steven meets the title character (Ewan McGregor), a gentle blond Southerner with whom he falls in love at first sight, he is obsessively besotted and will do anything to be with his beloved. The movie is as blunt about the mechanics of gay sex as an episode of “South Park,” and it is likely to meet grass-roots resistance. A star vehicle whose first gay erotic moment shows Mr. Carrey engaged in loud anal sex is asking for trouble. 
 
 The mixture of solemnity and caution that usually attach to homosexuality in movies is almost completely absent. Even AIDS is matter-of-factly addressed. But because the movie is really a farce with a bittersweet subtext, that hot action isn’t so hot. For all the kisses exchanged by Mr. Carrey and Mr. McGregor (with a shag haircut and a persuasive Southern vocal twang), there is no suggestion of any serious chemistry between the actors. But there is sweetness. In one scene the lovers slow dance and smooch to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are,” oblivious to the riot erupting outside their prison cell. 
 
 The story, narrated by Steven from his apparent deathbed, dashes pell-mell through his youth and young adulthood. Upon learning he is adopted, he vows to lead a model-citizen existence, becomes a policeman, marries and sires two children with Debbie (Leslie Mann), a devout Christian airhead. But his days of being a good boy end abruptly after he discovers his birth mother on a police computer, pays her an unannounced visit and has the door slammed in his face. 

 I Love You Phillip Morris 
 
 'I Love You Phillip Morris' review: Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor ham up prison romance 
 
 Handout 'I Love You Philip Morris' is based on a true story and stars Jim Carrey (r.) and Ewan McGregor (l.) as two prison inmates who fall in love. 
 
 A con man tries to make a life for himself and his lover. With Jim ­Carrey, Ewan McGregor. Directors: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa (1:50). R: Sexuality, language. At Lincoln Square, Chelsea Cinemas, Village 7. 
 
 
 
 Arriving some 10 months after it was due and feeling like an episode of "Three's Company" dressed in prison orange, "I Love You Phillip Morris" not only blasts gay stereotypes back decades, it could actually make people wish for a third Ace Ventura movie. Both of those are an accomplishment, though neither is a compliment. 
 
 Jim Carrey plays a closeted husband and father who gets into a car wreck, decides to live as an out gay man and runs up such a tab ("Being gay is expensive!") that he instigates financial frauds to make ends meet. In covering all this, Carrey tries to blend his more successful turns in serious satires ("The Truman Show," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") with his comic anarchy. But they cancel each other out, and what's left is a performance that evokes, in its charmless reserves of anger, such fidgety Carrey freaks as Ace, the Mask and the Riddler. 
 
 As for gay stereotypes: Though it glides in on a pretense of equality -- everyone deserves a romantic anti-establishment farce -- "Phillip Morris" uses a true story from the '90s as a catch-all, where the only thing that stands out is an incredibly mincing performance and a nudge-nudge sense of humor. 
 
 The mincing comes via Ewan McGregor, who as the title love interest is Steven Russell's (Carrey) soul mate. They meet in a Texas prison, where each is paying for white-collar crimes; once they're on the outside, the rambunctious Steven returns to his old flim-flammery, conning his way into boardrooms and corporate positions. 
 
 Phillip hates that side of Steven, and as much as he'd like to stand by his man -- as Steven's evangelical ex-wife (Leslie Mann) does -- he's shocked to find his beloved isn't even a lawyer, as he said. 
 
 Except everything Steven says sounds like a put-on, so the audience isn't surprised, despite a third-act twist that was daring for the real-life Russell and is handled well by writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, whose screenplay for 2003's "Bad Santa" was a far more successful tweaking of tradition. 
 
 Here they attempt to do more, and they do almost all of it badly. McGregor's vaudevillian turn, complete with small dog and a Southern accent best described as teenage Tennessee Williams, is distracting, as is Carrey's search for ways to accommodate his Gumby-ized flexibility. When he finds them, they're amusing but gratuitous, much like the movie's multiple prison escapes and excessive back-story. 
 
 Carrey is clearly hungry to wear a clown suit again. It's a shame he can't just be who he is and move on.
– Some critics are head-over-heels for I Love You Phillip Morris; others feel quite the opposite about the film, in which Jim Carrey plays a gay conman. (It's currently favored by 76% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes, though audiences give it a lesser 55%.) At the New York Times, Stephen Holden loves the picture: “With his manic glare, ferociously eager smile, hyperkinetic body language and talent for instant self-transformation, Mr. Carrey has rarely been more charismatic on the screen.” Peter Travers, who reviews the based-on-a-true-story flick in Rolling Stone, notes that “it's one crazy love story, but Carrey and (Ewan) McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing.” But Joe Neumaier slams the movie in the New York Daily News, saying it “not only blasts gay stereotypes back decades, it could actually make people wish for a third Ace Ventura movie. Both of those are an accomplishment, though neither is a compliment.”