Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005) / Comedy

MPAA Rated: R for pervasive crude humor, sexual humor, strong language, nudity, sexuality, drug content, and some violence
Running Time: 80 min.

Cast: Rob Schneider, Eddie Griffin, Hanna Verboom, Jeroen Krabbe, Norm McDonald, Til Schweiger, Douglas Sills, Adam Sandler (cameo)
Director: Mike Bigelow
Screenplay: Rob Schneider, David Garrett, Jason Ward
Review published February 2, 2006

Six years after the modestly funny Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, this superfluous sequel emerges, only this time, the balance between likeably kooky characters and gross-out gags is too far skewed toward the latter.  There's little sense to be had in why the creative minds that thought up this clunker felt the need to revisit Deuce, as most of the audience for the first film, namely adolescents, have long outgrown this type of juvenile-minded humor.  Unfortunately, Rob Schneider (50 First Dates, The Hot Chick) himself hasn't grown past it, as he is still making the same lowbrow, low-concept film that ranks high on the level of bad taste that it indulges in for the pursuit of easy laughs, while ranking abysmally low on the interest level pertaining to story craftsmanship, plot, or character development.

The story picks up several years after the last film, where Deuce, now a widower thanks to a dolphin-feeding accident that sees his beloved wife eaten by a shark, travels to Europe in order to escape the incessant hounding he's received after yet another embarrassing fiasco.  While in Amsterdam, Deuce hooks up with his old buddy and pimp, T.J. Hicks (Griffin, My Baby's Daddy), who finds himself the victim of mistaken identity when he is suspected of being the culprit behind a rash of male gigolo killings in the area.  With nowhere else to turn, Hicks enlists the assistance of Deuce in pretending to be a gigolo himself to try to catch the killer in the act.

It seems that the only emphasis the screenwriters of this mean-spirited sequel put toward the comedy is the injection of as many envelope-pushing gross-out gags as they could within the construct of its feeble premise.  Dick jokes, fart jokes, bodily fluids, and the rest of the gamut of disgusting humor is trotted out for our "amusement", which is made nearly intolerable in combination with the liberal amount of jokes against people afflicted with birth defects and other maladies.  Oddly, many of these jokes show a great deal of imagination, and yet, they go to waste on punch lines that will have you retching more than laughing at how distasteful they truly are.

What made the first film work somewhat was an underlying sweetness to the characters that allowed us to laugh at their foibles, and even when things became outlandish, the gags were never more outrageous than they needed to be for us to see the humor in the situation.  Sadly, after six years of films that were far more outrageous in terms of potty humor than Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Schneider and co. are stuck in a game of gross-out one-upsmanship, and we, the audience, are the only ones to suffer as a result.  Needless to say, this is the kind of film that is critic-proof.  The audience for this kind of humor will easily find it, while those that aren't inclined to will readily, and wisely, avoid it. 

At one particular point in the film, one of the characters proclaims, "That's the grossest thing I've ever seen; and I've seen some pretty gross things!"  This one sentence is the perfect review blurb for this wretched barf-a-thon, as it is likely to be the only thing that anyone that manages to sit through this film is likely to utter once its meager (and quite merciful) 80 minute running time expires.

Qwipster's rating:

©2006 Vince Leo