Manchild

The man-whore’s back. While it’s hard to imagine legions of fans clamoring for the sequel to 1999’s Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, it’s also hard to begrudge Rob Schneider a living. Especially when he’s so willing to turn the joyously transgendered Deuce so utterly inside out, in ways simultaneously outrageous and tedious.

No doubt, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is feeble. It makes no pretense otherwise, offering no plot per se, but only what seems an endless series of genitalia and gender jokes. Suffice it to say that Deuce has not moved on much since last you saw him. In a bit of trouble in California (something about scaring dolphins into biting and crashing into elderly swimmers) and feeling sad anyway, following the loss of his pretty blond amputee wife to sharks, he’s easily convinced to trot off to Amsterdam when T.J. (Eddie Griffin) calls.

Little does deuce know that he’s walking into a pile of trouble, not only because T.J.‘s living on a pimp-boat (a figurehead of his own muscled torso on the front, low-rider hydraulics to make it sit sideways), but his stable of he-bitches is thinning, this because a serial killer of male prostitutes is on the loose. Worse, he’s a suspect in the killings. Much, much worse, at least from T.J.‘s perspective, those who suspect him, including tabloid photographers and headline-writers, all think he’s gay. So, following each murder, he’s somehow on the scene, photo-op-ready, with a penis in his hand. And so the nominal plot commences: Deuce must date the women last seen with the last dead gigolo, Heinz Hummer (Til Schweiger), in order to determine their guilt or innocence. The fact that Deuce actually sees the killer—a tall, blond, Michael-Caine-looking woman in a leopard dress—leaving the scene only means he’s more nervous about discovering her.

And so again, Deuce reluctantly puts his “twatsicle” to work. and again, all the dates have seriously freakish “issues,” each involving a dick or vagina joke: Chernobyl baby Svetlana (Miranda Raison) was born with a penis as her nose, another has a hole in her neck, through which the red wine she guzzle spouts ferociously, and still another is “the biggest woman” Deuce has ever seen: she demands that he dress in diapers and play baby for mama, suckling included.

Amid his research, Deuce finds another lovely blond to like, OCD-afflicted Eva (former Top of the Pops presenter Hanna Verboom), who happens to be the niece of the self-righteous serial killer case investigator Detective Gaspar Jeroen Krabbé (who used to make real movies, like The Punisher). The script seems the result of Schneider and friends locked in a room for a few hours, a series of penis-or-vagina jokes (Asian gigolo Lil Kim’s penis is three inches, a cat T.J. meets likes “big hairy balls”), brief appearances by Antoine (Oded Fehr), Norm MacDonald, and Adam Sandler, and assorted gags concerning midgets, T.J. eating French fries out of the toilet, boobies, anti-American sentiment, weapons of mass destruction, ass-hair bleaching, projectile ejaculate, and a woman with a literal shit-face.

Amid the onslaught, you might find yourself wondering why. Not why, in the sense that the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein posed the question, as his declaration that Schneider represents all that’s wrong in U.S. movies prompted a full-page ad in industry trades, energizing still more controversy (Roger Ebert joined in) and garnered still more publicity. (The answer to that why is what’s the use in asking?) And not why in the sense that you actually care whether Deuce represents a broader cultural understanding of sex, property, and alternative sexualities.

Rather, the question of why is more abstract. Why Deuce now? His rowdy but also naïve sexuality, his charming efforts to improve all his dates’ lives (he finds them jobs, encourages their self-esteem), and his immersion in an X-rated world made to seem quaint and silly might be related to the taming of the “Aristocrats” joke (at least its reduction to big screen entertainment). Much like the Adam Sandler manchild, Deuce is simultaneously cloying and obscene, goofy and dull, conservative even as he pretends to transgress. Come to think of it, he might be perfect for the present moment.