The Hot Chick Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 20th, 2002
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I had hoped Being John Malkovich would set the bar so high on the whole body-swapping genre that no one else would even attempt it, but Rob Schneider seems to be building quite the successful career for himself by absconding with the ball Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman spiked into the end zone. Trouble is, Schneider's running in the wrong direction, and most likely with his helmet on backwards. His latest - The Hot Chick - is exactly what you'd expect an Adam Sandler-produced, Schneider-written movie to be. It aims to please the lowest of the low (of which I am a card-carrying member) and offend anyone who is at least two generations removed from primordial ooze.
I'm not the world's biggest Schneider fan, but I do dig the gross-out comedies and can safely say Chick is the worst of the three films he's headlined. Then again, they might not be getting worse so much as I am getting tired of watching them. They're the same frigging movies over and over again: Schneider always plays a Schneider-esque loser who, through a bit of topsy-turvy, becomes something spectacularly different, like a gigolo, or an animal, and now a girl.
There's some mumbo-jumbo at the beginning about an ancient pair of earrings, but the bottom line is that Schneider's gas-station-robbing Clive ends up swapping bodies with impossibly cute cheerleading captain Jessica (Rachel McAdams) just days before the prom and the big cheerleading competition Sadly, Chick focuses 95% of its attention on the Clive-in-Jessica story. I'm not saying the Jessica-in-Clive story would have been any better (though it probably would have), but it would certainly have been a lot easier on the eyes.
You can pretty much write the rest of the movie yourself. In fact, at my preview screening, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in front of a family whose school-aged son explained everything that was going to happen minutes before it actually did. What does that tell you about the complexity of your script? Why not just have a 90-minute montage of Schneider falling down the stairs and getting whacked in the crotch?
Anna Faris (the girl from the Scary Movie movies) plays Jessica's best friend April and comes off a lot funnier than the one-note Schneider. She makes her predictable, thinly constructed role into something nearly memorable, which, for a film of this magnitude, is quite an amazing accomplishment. Sandler, whose Happy Madison company produced Chick, provides a moderately amusing cameo which the observant might remember froman old Saturday Night Live skit.
1:46 - PG-13 on appeal for crude and sexual humor, language and drug references
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