Reception
The film was a critical and commercial flop, only earning back $57.6 million of its $84 million budget, making it a box office bomb.
Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film 75th in the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, with a rating of 6%.
In his review on At the Movies, Richard Roeper stated "In the five years I've been co-hosting this show, this is the closest I've ever come to walking out halfway through the film, and now that I look back on the experience, I wish I had." Roger Ebert stated "What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall." Lou Lumerick of the New York Post said "Parents who let their kids see this stinker should be brought up on abuse charges; so should the movie ratings board that let this suggestive mess slip by with a PG rating." When placing blame for the film's critical failure, critic Willie Waffle of WaffleMovies.com asserted, "How far down the Hollywood food chain do you have to go before you get stuck with Jamie Kennedy as the star of your movie? Did Ben Affleck turn down Son of the Mask? Was Carrot Top busy? Did Pauly Shore refuse to return your calls?"
It was the most nominated film at the 2005 Golden Raspberry Awards with eight, winning for Worst Remake or Sequel, and won several 2005 Stinkers Awards, including Worst Actor (Jamie Kennedy), Worst Sequel and Worst Couple (Kennedy and Traylor Howard).
When asked in an interview about whether the film's negative critical reaction had damaged Kennedy's morale in wanting do another project like this, Kennedy replied to the interviewer, "Yes. You got me right after a batch of bad interviews so I'm going to be honest with you about this. It does because I'm just being killed, absolutely killed... But honestly, doing this movie is an interesting experience because I just came off my show and Malibu's Most Wanted where I had a good amount of control. And then in this movie I didn't have any control. I just can't do that. I have to have my voice in there. If I can't, I'm just going to be like I'm doing someone else's thing. I have to have some of my voice because I have my own experiences that I lived through. All I can do is just try to make things independently. That's the only way you can do it. The only way you can do that is if you're a huge, huge, huge star. I'm not there yet. I'm just like a working actor." The overwhelmingly negative reviews of Son of the Mask, some of which attacked Kennedy personally, inspired Kennedy to co-create the documentary film Heckler, an examination of both hecklers and professional critics.
Read more about this topic: Son Of The Mask
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