Written by: Harris Goldberg & Rob Schneider
Directed by: Mike Mitchell
Starring: Rob Schneider, Arija Bareikis, Oded Fehr, Richard Riehle, Eddie Griffin
My Advice: Wait for MST3K.
Deuce Bigalow (Schneider) is a loser. He gets fired from his job cleaning fish tanks at the aquarium because for some reason he enjoys removing algae from tanks while he’s nude. The young lady at his local fish shoppe won’t go out with him. And if he didn’t have enough cards stacked against him, he’s played by Rob Schneider. He gets a chance at something different though when he falls in with a gigolo (Fehr), who gets paid to give pleasure to women. When said gigolo goes out of town, Deuce takes over his life and proceeds to try to give out some pleasure of his own.
He certainly gives no pleasure to his audience. Let me ask you something. If you were at a family reunion or something, and suddenly somebody walked in and said, “Look, everyone! Feces!”, would you roar with laughter or wonder where Uncle Frank left his medication? The reason I ask is that, as Spinal Tap so aptly put it, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. Clever lowbrow humor is, for example, the South Park flick. Stupid lowbrow humor is this film, where it seems they merely made a list of every possible bit regarding human waste, nipples, sex, and fat women – and strung them together without bothering to ask, “Is this funny?” No, it’s not funny. I remember chuckling to myself about three times. The rest of the time I was thinking, “This got financing?”
[ad#longpost]Schneider helped write this thing, so let me mention something else that’s not inherently funny – his ass. Why do I bring this up? Because I can’t remember the last film that had so many shots of the lead male’s ass. The only actor who seems to be doing anything noteworthy is Eddie Griffin as Deuce’s man-pimp, T.J., but he’s saddled with food jokes and wordplay about “manwhores” which are…you guessed it…about as funny as a brick to the head. A quick couple of nods to a recent Hollywood smash go down like a brick too, as does a subplot with a detective (William Forsythe) who wants to bust Deuce one minute and whip out his member for advice the next. Oh, and Deuce finds true love along the way as well, in Kate (Bareikis), which was such an interesting turn of events that I almost forgot to mention it.
Basically this film is for people in the single digits who can appreciate unabashed meaningless toilet humor. Anyone else should simply put their head down on a table and pray for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison films, the originator of this mess.
