In Son of the Mask, Jamie Kennedy is an aspiring cartoonist with a problem. His wife has just had a baby with superpowers, and the dog, an adorable Jack Russell terrier, is profoundly jealous of the attention the baby is getting. It doesn't help that the baby, who is able to catapult from room to room like Tarzan in the jungle, manages to get all his acts of wanton destruction blamed on the dog. So the dog heads down to the pub for a pint, and as he is stumbling home in a drunken stupor, he sees a peculiar object mostly covered by newspapers.

I think you all know what that object is. It's the mask. It's that same stupid mask that caused Jim Carrey to act like such a moron in the first film. So the dog puts his face against the mask and transforms into a slobbering cartoon nightmare, complete with elongated ears and a lolling tongue. Just like you'd expect from a preternaturally smart Jack Russell terrier with a 'first child' complex.

But then, the story takes a turn for the bizarre. Jamie Kennedy turns out to be an alien (didn't we see this coming?), and one day the family wakes up to find him in his true form: a little green guy with long ears and a voice that sounds suspiciously like Frank Oz. "An alien I am," he says, and turns the TV to the Lifetime network. His wife shrieks in horror (whether at her husband's unorthodox appearance or the bad melodrama, we don't know) and takes off out the door, never to be seen again. That leaves Yoda Kennedy, his pole-vaulting freak-baby, and the Jack Russell terrier.

Setting aside domestic life, the family decides to go into the business of fighting crime. The superbaby confronts and overpowers the villains with kung-fu; the terrier shoots past at the speed of light, collecting the stolen items; and Yoda Kennedy sketches funny caricatures of the perps to show the police. One of these scenes involves a criminal who is using industrial suction cups to climb an office building. The superbaby, who is standing perpendicular against the building, looks down at the thief and says, "Something wrong with the elevator?" This comedic moment is one of the funniest in the film, and it isn't a bit derivative.

At any rate, their crime-fighting trio is incredibly successful. They attain fame and fortune, but it soon becomes a problem that they never bothered to come up with disguises or alter egos. As a result, the paparazzi begins to hound them constantly. Suberbaby can't go out to get the paper in his housecoat without having his photo taken and plastered all over tabloids everywhere. ("Crime-Fighting Superbaby Too Depressed to Leave the House.") Worse yet, the criminals are staying far away from them.

In the end, Yoda Kennedy takes them all to the Bling-Bling planet in the Dagobah system, which turns out to be a replica of our own Antarctica. The family heads off into the wilderness, past the rocks with the scientifically curious striations, past the city of the Old Ones, and into the heart of the terrifying purple mountains, where they witness horrors too great for the mortal mind.

Overall, I found this movie to be quite a light-hearted romp, although at times it strains credibility. It's a great bit of summer escapism that will have the added bonus of keeping your kids docile (by frightening the bejesus out of them). Add to that the ringing endorsement by Richard Roeper—that smug, undiscriminating Gene Siskel wannabe—and you've got a film you simply must see.

As soon as it goes to video.