The Hot Chick (2002) / Comedy

MPAA Rated: PG-13 for crude humor, sexual humor, language, and drug references
Running Time: 104 min.

Cast: Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris, Matthew Lawrence, Eric Christian Olsen, Robert Davi, Melora Hardin, Alexandra Holden, Maritza Murray  
Director: Tom Brady
Screenplay: Tom Brady, Rob Schneider
Review published May 17, 2003

The Hot Chick delivers exactly what you would expect from a Happy Madison production:  Crude bathroom humor, sexual innuendo, and the basest of sight gags, all of which will tickle the funny bone of the lowest of lowbrow film lovers.  Painfully unfunny much of the time, this film will only appeal to those who find the most obvious of gags to be hilarious, the kind of audiences where any attempt at subtlety is lost.  It's all the same stuff from the same people in a different package.  A more appropriate title would have been Sex and Poop Movie 23.

McAdams (Mean Girls, The Notebook) plays Jessica, a hot chick who is too stuck up to notice people hate her.  Schneider (Eight Crazy Nights, Mr. Deeds) plays Clive, a lowlife male in his 30s.  When some ancient African earrings get put in the mix, they are revealed to have magical powers for identity switching, causing the girl and man to switch bodies.  Jessica, now trapped as a man, tries to maintain some semblance of her life while trying to find a way to reverse the process, while Clive lives it up, utilizing the young woman's body as a means to make a quick buck.

This is perhaps the most tired plot in comedies, and while it does open up some funny situations, there's really very little that The Hot Chick explores in story that hasn't been done to death countless times before.  The only thing that sets it apart is how low it is willing to go to evoke laughter in the audience, and while there are a few moments that might elicit a chuckle here and there, it's mostly a simple-minded excursion into depravity that will entertain 15-year-old boys, or those who still haven't outgrown that mentality.

I suppose if you typically enjoy Schneider's brand of humor, and like all of Sandler's films, you're likely to come away thinking this is time well spent.  Anyone else with even an ounce of expectation that this will ever transcend its fascination with its own bodily functions will be in for a painful night at the movies.  Like the hot chicks you knew in high school, this one is as shallow and mean-spirited as the hottest of them.

Qwipster's rating:

©2003 Vince Leo