Only in the last half-hour of this film from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (the scriptwriting team who gave us Bad Santa) does it click that we're getting the gritty, true tale of king conman Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) and his jailbird lover, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor). For the first three-quarters of the movie, the characters — though multi-dimensional — are trapped in an alternative Forrest Gump reality where Texas prison life is fun if you enjoy giving blowjobs. Only vaguely accurate in detail, I LoveYouPhillipMorris shows Russell, who is now serving a life sentence, transforming from a happily married but closeted Christian cop into a South Beach player who realizes that being gay is really expensive. So he uses his genius wit to run scams of dirty rotten proportions. The film will garner attention as a sunny gay romance, and that's unfortunate — it would have worked much better as a gritty drama about the most toxic non-violent criminal in Texas history.
