I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

There’s one thing you got to admire about a performer like Adam Sandler, he has an incredible gift for managing to make juvenile and crude humor mass-appealing every time out. That’s a rare gift and despite proving himself more talented than he leads on in more dramatic fare like Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, and Reign Over Me, Sandler is still admirably true to his roots.

The Saturday Night Live alum seemingly has never grown tired of making the kind of films that made him a star in the first place, which are juvenile and crude, yet often fun and lovable comedies that he clearly enjoys every moment of doing, even when us critics grow fairly tired of his one-note comedy shtick. However, not even Sandler’s likeability and considerable good intentions can save him from his latest signature Sandler comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, now available on DVD.

Widower Larry Valentine (Kevin James) and womanizer Chuck Levine (Adam Sandler) are longtime best friends who work together in New York City as firefighters. However, Larry runs into trouble when he tries to help his children be covered in his pension plan.

Larry discovers that a loophole around the problem is to remarry. After saving Chuck’s life during one of their firefighting rounds, he asks his best friend to get a domestic partnership by pretending they are a gay couple.

They soon ally with lawyer Alex McDonough (Jessica Biel), who they manage to fool into believing they are gay and instruct them to be legally wed in Canada, where gay marriage is legal. However, the newly married best friends face problems in keeping their scheme afloat.

Chuck begins to develop a girl friend relationship with Alex, while secretly harboring feelings for her. They also become ridiculed and made the target of homophobia by their fellow firefighters and a snooping fraud investigator (Steve Buscemi) threatens to uncover whether or not they are really gay.

It must first be said that both Adam Sandler and Kevin James make a fantastic pair in I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. They are very energetic, have a lot of chemistry, James, in particular, continues to prove himself to be a great on-screen comic presence, and they keep the film fairly upbeat and joyful to watch, even at its worst.

However, not even the likeability of Sandler and James combined can mask the film’s glaring negatives. The script is not only as dumb, crude, and sexist as past Sandler vehicles of this nature, but despite its apparent good intentions, it manages to do everything possible to completely contradict its own message.

Despite being a film that supposedly preaches gay tolerance, it practically spends a lot of time milking every gay cliché and stereotype known to man. Even more egregious is its often wallowing in racial stereotypes. One in particular is an incredibly unrecognizable Rob Schneider as one of the most grotesque Asian caricatures ever seen on ...