Movie review: 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' – Times Herald-Record

Movie review: 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' – Times Herald-Record

“I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry” is a pretend-to-be-gay firefighter’s farce that is entirely too stupid and crude to tote its alleged “message” about tolerance through the flames to safety.
The tricky mission Adam Sandler, his writers and his go-to director, Dennis Dugan (“Problem Child,” “Big Daddy,” “Benchwarmers” and other classics), set out on is to take an audience moronic enough to roar at the gay slur that rhymes with “maggot” to a place where they’re a little ashamed of ever having said that word.
But the movie is written and played in a way that rhymes-with-maggot is set up to get the big, bigoted laugh every time.
“Pronounce” presumes to puncture stereotypes even as it is trotting out every mincing, leather-clad sissy this side of Fire Island to reinforce those stereotypes.
It’s positively retro, from the “Tootsie”-“Victor/Victoria”-“Black Like Me” journey an oversexed hetero-jerk played by Sandler must take to the obligatory Rob Schneider cameo, as a Japanese justice of the peace lisping, “Do you have the wing? Wepeat after me, with this wing, I thee wed” or the equivalent. Schneider serves up the most offensive Asian caricature since Mickey Rooney’s racist “Horree Go — Right-ree” “Breakfast at Tiffanies” taunt.
Chuck (Kevin James) is a widowed New York firefighter who worries that his pension won’t go to his children if he is killed on the job. His strange solution? Pretend he has a domestic partner. Since he just saved Larry’s life on the job, Larry (Sandler), a confirmed hound with inexplicable powers over Brooklyn’s many Hooters Girls, is the guy he cons into the con.
Harmless enough, right? But the city, in the person of a particularly unfunny Steve Buscemi, investigates. The lads’ hot lawyer (Jessica Biel) advises the guys have to take their “relationship” to the next level. They go to Canada to marry.
And they face questioning, from their captain (Dan Aykroyd), from Chuck’s smart-mouthed kids, from homophobic firefighters, from the lawyer.
Yes, the panting Larry says to the often under-clad attorney, “I boarded the dude train.”
Biel is here to show off the bod and show she’s a good sport. Ving Rhames tries to play against type as another firefighter with a secret. Aykroyd struggles to re-establish his moron movie credentials. James and Sandler do little more than go through the motions.
The usual Dennis Dugan touches are here — a tyke stuck in the toilet, plenty of dope-slaps, a mincing show-tune-loving 9-year-old son whom Chuck desperately wants to butch-up.
Gay actor Richard Chamberlain and gay singer Lance Bass have cameos, which suggests this wasn’t filmed with the worst of intentions. But it was a movie from a guy with a few flops behind him, desperately needing to reconnect with his inner moron — Sandler. What did they expect?
Sandler’s ad-libs have the sting of an actor worried about his image and how this will play to his core audience. There’s no newlywed kissing, thank you. A party is “homo-palooza” because “Gay guys know how to dance good. It’s the law, or something.”
Even the message is botched, utterly, in a finale that no one should have to face sober.
“There’s nothing worse than pretending to be something you’re not.”
In Sandler’s case, that pretense would be “tolerant” and “hip.”
• H • Poor • Rated: PG-13 (crude sexual content throughout, language and drug references) • Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin James • Directed by: Dennis Dugan • Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes • Playing at: AMCG, CHES, DEST, FISH, FOAK, HUDV, LYCE, MONT, ORPH, OVER, PALIS, PALTZ, PGAL, ROSV, SHOW, WARW

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