Meanwhile, the triplets grow up to become academically gifted huge men (Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, Jerod Mixon). They remain loyal to their legal father, Charlie, and continue to live with him in a really small house.
Charlie finally goes bonkers, and develops a split personality. His alter ego is Hank, a tough guy and troublemaker whose actions often backfire. Because it is a movie, Charlie isn't fired because of Hank's antics. Instead, he is assigned to escort a cute single woman, Irene (Renée Zellwenger) to New York to face trumped up charges.
Because it is a movie, Irene is unwittingly a murder target of her former employer, Dickie Thurman (Daniel Greene). Because it is a movie, Thurman has bribed leaders of the state police, FBI, etc. into acting as hitmen to take out Irene, particularly Chris Cooper and Richard Jenkins.
Soon, and somehow, Charlie/Hank and Irene are on the run from law enforcement and Thurman. During their misadventures, they encounter albino waiter Whitey (Michael Bowman) at a restaurant, and he becomes their unlikely companion and enabler.
How others will see it. Me, Myself & Irene did well where it counted: at the box office. The worldwide gross was triple the budget, and that doesn't count video sales and rentals, and television rights. At imdb.com, the movie has 186K user votes, which shows that more people enjoy crude inanity than would admit it in public.
Unsurprisingly, the movie was ignored by cinema festivals, except for those based on viewer polls. Critics typically found the film derivative, and the imdb.com user ratings predictably decline with advancing age, from 6.8 under 18 to 6.0 over age 45. A significant gender gap persists: women over 45 grade it only 5.4, and may feel insulted by Irene's pressured marriage to the older and insane Charlie/Hank.
Ultimately, how you regard this movie depends upon what you think of Jim Carrey's schtick. If his silly-weird character from The Mask or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was amusing instead of embarrassing, so it will be again in Me, Myself & Irene.
How I felt about it. Some of others' complaints about this movie don't bother me. For example, Charlie's sons' expletives are a natural result of watching Richard Pryor shows when young. The scatalogical humor, common to Farrelly films, is done better by Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs, but typically doesn't detracts much.
The exception is when it makes no sense: why would Hank sodomize himself with a two-foot dildo? Are we supposed to laugh when Charlie's thumb is shot off?
We also note that Hank could go to prison for forcibly dunking preadolescent girls and breast feeding from strangers. Mental illness is mischaracterized here for laughs. But, given that Jim Carrey is in the lead, it is nothing more than we should expect. Carrey has specialized in absurd characters since at least Earth Girls Are Easy (1988).
Still, why would Charlie's surfer girl wife leave him for a black midget, without taking any of their three biological children? Why would a golf course developer decide to track down and kill his former employees, which requires bribing every law enforcement agency enough to act as his hitmen? Why wouldn't Thurman shoot Charlie dead instead of waiting for him to reach Thurman and Irene?
Most of all, why would Irene want to marry an insane man with one thumb, and live with him in a tiny house along with four other adult men (if Whitey is included)?