Ace Ventura – Pet Detective | 1989
- Locations |
- Florida
- DIRECTOR |
- Tom Shadyac
Miami, Florida, is the location as Jim Carrey shoots to overnight megabucks stardom with his love-it-or-hate-it manic shtick as the animal-friendly ’tec tracking down the Miami Dolphins’ kidnapped mascot, Snowflake.
Ace Ventura (Carrey) keeps a secret menagerie in his ‘Surfside’ apartment, the Campton Apartments, 1455 Washington Avenue – alongside the artsy rock venue Cameo Theatre at 1445 near Espanola West – in the newly-revitalised art deco district of South Beach.
The football stadium from which Snowflake disappears is the real home of the Miami Dolphins, the Sun Life Stadium (formerly and famously the Joe Robbie Stadium), 347 Don Shula Drive, Miami Gardens, a hi-tech 73,000 seater sports arena about 16 miles northwest of downtown Miami. If you fancy catching a game, there’s a Metro-Dade Transit Authority bus from town.
You can also visit the exclusive seafront villa of fish-collector Ronald Camp (Udo Kier), where Ace skips the party to find a shark in the cellar.
This is Villa Vizcaya, 3251 South Miami Avenue at 32nd Road in Coconut Grove on the coast of South Miami, built in 1916 as the winter home of magazine founder James Deering.
A smaller-scale Xanadu, the Italian Renaissance mansion is packed with European artefacts – Roman sarcophagi, Catherine de Medici’s fireplace, the contents of Italian villas. There are formal gardens and tours of the building. A frequently-used location, you can also see the villa as the home of villain Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) in Iron Man 3, in Absence of Malice, as the mansion of James Stewart in Airport ’77 and as the site of the mayor's bash in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday.
