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'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo' is crude, unfunny

By ROGER MOORE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Who is killing the great "prosti-dudes" of Europe?

And might Deuce Bigalow, pequeno gigolo, be the only man who can catch this fiend and make Amsterdam safe for the hash-smoking, sex-trading little Dutch boys?

Columbia Pictures

'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo'

The verdict: A film so not-funny they made it twice.

Director: Mike Bigelow
Starring: Rob Schneider, Eddie Griffin, Edwin Alofs, Til Schweiger, Jean Reno
Run time: 83 minutes
Release date: August 12, 2005
Rating: R for pervasive strong crude and sexual humor, language, nudity and drug content.
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On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

"Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" sends the repellent Rob Schneider character — a male hooker so pathetic he's only comfortable selling his wares to the disabled, the deformed and the demented — off to the Old World to solve this mystery. Because the sex-for-hire he-men of the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Scotland just aren't up to the job.

So to speak.

The "Deuce" sequel is roughly twice as funny as the insipid "The Dukes of Hazzard" — which wasn't that funny — and twice as raunchy. Welcome to August at the movies.

How they slipped this c-word-happy, bodily-fluid-flinging slapshtick past the increasingly deaf and dumb Motion Picture Association of America is the real mystery here. It must take a couple more Canadians-use-the-streets-as-a-toilet jokes to get to NC-17.

Deuce has married and buried his girlfriend from the first film. The fish-loving Deuce accidentally let her get eaten by a shark. When his old buddy, pimp T.J. (Eddie Griffin), summons him to Europe, Deuce seems destined to return to his old life in the sex trade.

But as we've seen in an opening scene in which a Jude Law look-alike is whacked after servicing a whole household of Euro-aristocracy, somebody is killing off the competition. A cop played by Jeroen Krabbe hasn't a clue, but he busts T.J. for the crimes.

At least the cop's niece, a comic obsessive-compulsive named Eva played by aptly-named Belgian Hanna Verboom, is cute, with lots of "adorable" tics. Maybe Deuce can learn to love again.

After he has proved T.J. is innocent.

After he has put on a diaper, gotten stoned on brownies and taken the taunts of his fellow gigolos — "If it isn't Deuce Not-Very-Big-Below."

And after he has questioned/serviced every woman in the various gigolos' little black books.

The gags involve a Russian born too close to Chernobyl (she has a penis for a nose), a woman who speaks with an electronic voice box and spews smoke and wine from the hole in her throat, a giantess, a hygiene-impaired yokel and so on.

Norm Macdonald amuses himself playing an aged Scottish gigolo.

"When they said we hadda stop serrrrrvicing under-age guuuuurulllls, I stood dooooon."

And everything ends with a big gigolo competition where the toy boys show off the skills of their trade — "the Portuguese Breakfast," the "Turkish snowcone" — you get the picture.

Schneider seems exhausted by this. Griffin, ever the pro, gives his all. Krabbe looks lost. Only Macdonald scores every time he's onscreen.

They blew half their budget on a pimp-barge for T.J. and a cool effect that has the stoned Deuce crawling into an impressionist painting.

Not a whole lot of imagination here, though the jokes about Europe's attitude toward America post-Iraq and the trash-talk between gigolos are funny.

Least imaginative of all — the TV-commercial director they hired to film it. Yeah, his name is Bigelow, Mike Bigelow. That must've been a real knee-slapper of a meeting.

"Get this, get this, we'll hire a Bigelow to direct 'Bigalow'! HAW!"