DVD REVIEW: DEUCE BIGALOW – MALE GIGOLO (SE)

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Touchstone Home Entertainment
MSRP: $19.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 88 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• "Making the Deuce" featurette
• "Fly on the Wall" featurette
• Director’s video diary
• Seven deleted scenes

The Pitch

"You
know what’s great about comedy? Spontaneity. If you ‘review’ the script or
‘read’ a treatment, guess what you’ll be destroying. Spontaneity. Best you just
don’t ask questions and let Mr. Sandler make his movie."

The Humans

Rob
Schneider (who writes nasty letters to journalists), Eddie Griffin (who
doesn’t), Oded Fehr (The Mummy), Amy Poehler (SNL).

The Nutshell

Deuce
Bigalow makes his money cleaning fish tanks and retrieving goldfish from toilet
plumbing. One day, he has a job at the opulent apartment of one Antoine Laconte,
who happens to be in the business of "giving women pleasure." Antoine
is leaving town for a few days, and asks Deuce to watch over the apartment
while he’s away.

Being an
irrepressible knucklehead, Deuce accidentally trashes the apartment, to the
tune of about $6,000 worth of damage. So, how on earth could he possibly come
up with six grand in just a few days? Why, prostitution, of course!

The Lowdown

It’s easy
enough to reduce the failures of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo to a
single word: repetition. The jokes don’t come too quickly, and there are only
five or six of them, albeit repeated in different contexts. It’s like the
concept that God had only a couple dozen molds for humans, which he reused,
explaining why you seem to keep running into the same sort of people over and
over again. The redundancy even stretches to the title. "Gigolo"
already carries the "male" in its definition, so saying, "male
gigolo" is kind of like saying, "knots per hour." (Thanks,
Encyclopedia Brown!)

That’s
the thing about dumb comedies. They’re very deliberately stupid. The laughs
come from dick and fart equivalents, but the framework supporting them is at
least built by capable hands. Deuce‘s structure reminds me of
catchphrases. They’re moderately funny the first time you hear them. They’re
less funny the second time, though comfortably familiar. Then, as your peers or
television drone on and on with them, you feel as though each repetition is
degrading the processes of your brain, that you need something new or your cells will starve.

Or
something like that. By the time you experience your fourth or fifth
intentional depantsing of a certain detective, the laughs have pretty well
dried up. There’s a decent love story underpinning the second half of the film,
and a neatly-wrapped message about accepting the differences in people, but
both are about as cliché as a novel for sixth-graders, and that’s selling Judy
Blume short.

Rob
Schneider can be a funny guy. His performance here is more restrained than you
might expect, but his brand of humor kind of cries out for a bit more
flamboyance. His comedies live or die on the script’s ability to make the
audience laugh out of embarrassment, and the character of Deuce is just a bit
too sympathetic for us to really get into the ol’ schadenfreude.

All in
all, Deuce
Bigalow is about as inoffensive as a sex comedy can get. It’s
repetitive, but is worth a few chuckles now and then. I can’t recommend it
highly, though, because, like an unwanted houseguest, its welcome is worn out
far too soon.

The Package

This is
the "Little Black Book Edition" of the film. What does that mean? It
means that you get a paltry showing of bonus features and the opportunity to
spend your money a second time, if you were the type to buy the bare bones
edition all those millennia ago.

The
bonuses are a behind-the-scenes featurette called "Making the Deuce,"
which begins with Rob Schneider admitting that this was his first produced
script. The director, Mike Mitchell, has a segment called a video diary, but it
isn’t really — it’s just backstage footage that contains with Mitchell as the
focus. There’s also a featurette called "Fly On The Set" which takes
a handful of scenes and shows you what happened during their filming. This is
the most interesting bonus, partly because it’s unique, and partly because the
actual process of filmmaking is an interesting animal.

The big
draw of the bonuses, supposedly, are the seven deleted scenes. They are mostly
further repetitions of established jokes, with one or two bits of vague new
humor. They’re in such crappy condition, though, that it’s pretty painful to
watch them, quality of content aside.

5.3 out of 10