I always hoped I would live my entire life without hearing someone utter the words “Rob Schneider IS the hot chick.” Once again, life proves to be one crushing disappointment after another.
The premise of this insipid, worthless comedy is that a hoochie high school girl named Jessica (Rachel McAdams) puts on a magic earring that makes her switch bodies with whoever wears the other one. In this case, it’s a low-life criminal named Clive (Rob Schneider). So one morning she wakes up, and she has Rob Schneider’s body. You can imagine the shame. Bad enough you’re a lithe young teen-age hottie who suddenly has a man’s body; does it have to be Rob Schneider’s? That horrific thought alone warrants an R rating.
At any rate, Jessica calls her best friend April (Anna Faris) and convinces her that, Schneideristic appearance aside, she really is Jessica, and April accepts her for who she is. So do their other friends. They also start to accept the fat girl, and the witch girl, and the black girl accepts her Korean mother — in the end, every single character, including some of the extras and people hired by the caterer, has had a change of heart and learned to accept people for who they are.
Whatever. The movie’s still not funny.
But back to the point. Now stuck in a man’s body, Jessica does the worst thing she could do: She keeps acting like herself. A smart person in this situation would realize that since she looks like a man, she should probably try to act like one, wear a man’s clothes, use a man’s mannerisms, and so on. But Rob Schneider acting like a man isn’t funny. Rob Schneider acting like a girl, though — well, that’s not funny, either. But it at least has potential.
And so there’s Rob Schneider, talking like a girl and wearing frilly clothing and looking at cute guys. Naturally, everyone around him thinks he’s gay, which of course is THE FUNNIEST thing in the world, to think a guy is gay. And then, when Jessica in Rob’s body convinces her boyfriend (Matthew Lawrence) that it’s her inside there, and that if he truly loves her, it won’t matter what her body looks like, and then they almost kiss — DUDE, that’s two guys kissing! No way!
Nearly all of the humor in the film relies on characters behaving contrary to the way real people behave, which ruins the chances of it being funny. The fact that Jessica doesn’t even try to put on an act is severely limiting, and on that flimsy premise hangs the entire film.
Schneider is not an especially gifted comedian, though I enjoyed his last two films, “Deuce Bigalow” and “The Animal.” “The Hot Chick,” though, is a step backward, an uneven, unfunny, unenjoyable experience.
D (1 hr., 44 min.; )
