Man Whores, She Johns and He Pimps (Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo (DVD))

Member Name: dave27

Product:	Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo (DVD)
Date:	01/12/01 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some funny bits

Disadvantages: Pretty dull fare

How do you turn low life sleaze and prostitution into a lighter than air family comedy? Well Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Juliet Roberts was a pretty dull and unappetising attempt, but Deuce Bigalow is a pretty worthwhile effort and a lot more appealing than that one. In fact, all round it's highly enjoyable stuff and well worth ninety minutes of anyone's time.

Rob Schneider has come out of the shadow of working with Adam Sandler (The Waterboy, Big Daddy) to appear in the limelight as the unlikeliest of heroes, an accidental male prostitute with a heart of gold and a plunger that could charm all manner of unspeakable things out of a blocked toilet. The connection remains, however, cos Sandler is executive producer on the movie, and it has all the standard trademarks of a Sandler movie.

Schneider plays the Deuce of the title, a down at heel fish pond cleaner who happens across a high class male prostitute, Antoine Laconte (Oded Fehr, who was in The Mummy as a mysterious Bedouin), and gets asked to look after the gigolo's apartment and collection of tropical fish while he's away on business in South Africa. Unfortunately while he's using the exercise equipment he accidentally trashes the apartment big style and does around six thousand dollars' worth of damage, which he's got about a week to put right.

The only way to earn that sort of dosh is to ape his new landlord's lifestyle, fall in with He Pimp TJ Hicks and start earning big time for satisfying the deep seated needs of all sorts of female misfits, giants, enormous great Negroes, narcoleptics and one legged college gals. And he does all that without once getting his wedding tackle into action, because most of them just need a friend, a companion, a confidante and Deuce is exactly the man for the job.

He's very good at the non jiggy jiggy side of things but his heart definitely ain't in the job any more after he falls for one o
f the more normal clients (admittedly one with a false leg).

Now that's the basic premise of the whole thing, apart from a manic detective with a fixation on his over skinny penis and an obsession with sorting out Deuce's landlord. He continually asks Deuce to assure him that his odd physical attributes are nothing to concern yourself overly about.

It sounds like yer typical Hollywood comedy, complete with all the normal trite sentimentality, and in many ways it is, but running throughout it all like a silvery stream is a blend of quite funny comedy which genuinely makes you laugh, though not uproariously so. Schneider manages to carry it all off pretty well, although is obviously more believable washing around in the fish ponds than he is the extra marital bed chamber. He's actually a very promising comic talent, although bound to get extremely stereotyped.

However, having said all that, there's still not a great deal of intelligence, wit or subtlety on display here - it's the sort of film you can find yourself grinning at manically in the odd moment as you forget yourself, but you wouldn't want to go back for any second helping. If you've never seen it, don?t try too hard, if you have seen it, you know what I mean. You may well like this film, but you'll dislike yourself intensely for doing so...

Summary: