It doesn't take an hour of recycled comedic pranks, sex jokes and bad dialogue to figure out that just about any member or ex-member of the "Saturday Night Live" cast can snag a movie deal. Now Rob Schneider (as main manwhore Deuce Bigalow) and Adam Sandler (as cameo-making producer) are daring to show their names and faces again on the big screen in the weak wake of Big Daddy. And the really big question is: why?
Unlike some of their fellow "Saturday Night Live" players, who took their tried and tested TV skit characters to the big screen in the past few years (read: A Night at the Roxbury and Superstar), Sandler and Schneider — along with Norm MacDonald as a bartender — come out of left field with this poorly spun tale of a fish-tank keeper turned gigolo. It stretches its flimsy attempts at parody-at-large over totally unrelated movies, even some of the special effects from The Matrix.
In desperate need of everything but familiar names and selling points, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo doesn't earn a bit of credit for originality or a good script. Despite the fact that it's the first release for Sandler's new production company Happy Madison, it offers up few funny moments and lacks cohesiveness as a movie. The transitions are bad; the outcomes are predictable and the main character, Deuce, is often too ridiculous to even be funny.
As Deuce sinks into his predicament, paying to repair and restore the swanky apartment of the maniacal "real" gigolo who left him house- and fish-sitting, the effect is that of Naked Gun with an empty clip.
Deuce is assigned to service a bizarre lineup of women that starts with a middle-aged suburban vamp (played by Marlo Thomas) who wants him to dress up as a German tourist before he has sex with her. She pays him ten dollars and sends him on his way without even getting a full piece of his newly waxed behind and amateur male gigolo shtick. If only moviegoers could have been so lucky.
