In this, arguably his first grown-up film (discounting that criminally undervalued grown-up-but-grown-up-really-fucking-weird kick in the face, The Cable Guy), Jim Carrey resembles a cartoon more than perhaps ever before. It's not the rubber-faced, loose-limbed crazy guy, crazy planet stuff we've seen far too much of already, though. No, it's that his Truman Burbank - literally the only inhabitant of the idyllic (there doesn't seem to be a McDonalds) island town of Seahaven - is like one of those Spike Jonez cartoons that runs off the cliff edge with sheer momentum to keep him going and going, just so long as he doesn't look down. Not that Truman looks down; he looks up. Up when a studio spotlamp crashes on his driveway one perfect blue sky morning. Truman Burbank has lost his momentum.

He's the star, you see, of a TV show. He was born on camera, adopted by a corporation, and has grown up in this flawless world encapsulated inside of a huge studio. His world is the lights and secret cameras of producer Christof (Ed Harris, underplaying).

Which is already telling you far too much (as if you didn't know) about the film that marks the debut of our generation's Jerry Lewis as a serious actor. For its first half, The Truman Show doesn't give much more away than Truman himself twigs. And if you were lucky enough to be seeing it in a media vacuum then that would be kind of exciting. As it is, though, Peter Weir's return to film-making after a five year lay-off is burdened by audience expectations. Like The Cable Guy, a failure at the US box office would have given us a fairer crack of the whip.

That it's the Jim Carrey at the end - water-logged, windswept, straight-faced - that you remember and not the waggle-arsed comedian the film initially offers, is testament enough to the rehabilitation of a talent lost to the wacky wilderness. Like Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy, no one expects the clown to drop his red nose quite so spectacularly. But it's a trick he can only pull the once, and Carrey's choice of the Andy Kaufman biopic for his next seems eminently sensible.

But when the dust settles - and, if comes to it, better we see the scary-toothed funnyman walking off with an Oscar than Spielberg's Ryan - there will a any number of eggs smeared liberally across collective faces. This is a Late Review movie - the sort of picture critics love because it means they can salivate over Jim Carrey without having to apologise. The Truman Show is a cut above the usual studio fodder, but what is that saying really? Andrew Niccol's script doesn't have the black-hearted nerve of Fincher's Se7en, nor the mind-warping celluloid trippiness of Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, to name but two of Hollywood's more recent bums-on-seats triumphs. But, perhaps more pointedly, nor does it take as many risks as Weir's last, the deeply flawed but deeply fascinating Kieslowski-goes-studio strangeness that is 1993's Fearless. And even just this year, Niccol's own lush directorial debut, Gattaca, has a stylised dreaminess and emotional punch The Truman Show can only approximate. Look no further for evidence than the climax of each - the, admittedly intelligent and unforced, didacticism here, compared to the simple but definitive rush there. The use of Philip Glass' greatest hits is inspired, though.

The Truman Show is a surprisingly bitter film, willing to raise questions if not particularly address them (although the very last line is a killer). Sure, it's unusually satisfying for what it is, but just don't come complaining after a couple of hours that you're hungry again.