A real cartoon

Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) is a much put-upon functionary in a bank. His best friend berates him for being too nice, girls walk over him and his boss bullies him. The only sign of hope is when Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz) walks into the bank and asks for his help setting up an account. Sadly she is only there because her boyfriend it planning to rob the place.

After yet more humiliation Stanley accidentally discovers an ancient mask whose power transforms him into a kind of human-cartoon hybrid. Capable of every swirling, flying, bouncing, stretching move ever performed by the denizens of a Warner Brothers cartoon and able to whip props and costume changes out of thin air with more panache than Bugs Bunny, Ipkiss becomes an irrepressible engine of madcap romance and comic retribution - the Mask.

The plot follows Stanley's twin entanglements with Tina and her vicious boyfriend Dorian Tyrell but these are merely a framework to show off the insanity of Carrey's Mask. Whether he's pulling a full size sledgehammer out of his trouser pocket to smash a fleeing alarm clock, or fashioning a working tommy gun out of modelling balloons it is the Mask and his gags that are the thing. Plot serves about the same duty here as it would in the cartoons it is based on - it's just a mechanism for getting the characters from set piece to set piece.

And it works. Jim Carrey was born to be a cartoon and in The Mask he comes closer than anyone else has to capturing the flexible insanity of toonland in a live action film, displacing the only other real contender, Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But where Hoskins aped cartoon antics at one point, Carrey truly inhabits them. The well pitched special effects seem only to enhance his already plastic performance.

Cameron Diaz's debut performance requires little more of her than to look gorgeous and respond to Carrey. The former she does effortlessly, the latter seems a little stretched at times. Peter Greene as Dorian Tyrell is an effective villan providing the necessary element of threat without unbalancing the necessary silliness of the story.