I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Adam Sandler movies have rarely been critical favorites (although they have often been big money makers). This one, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which he produced and stars in, is no exception. In it he portrays Chuck, the best friend of Larry, played by Kevin James, a firefighter raising two kids after the death of his wife and worried about what will happen to them if he is killed in the line of duty. Although both men are straight, Larry persuades Chuck to become his domestic partner. "The result is a disappointing mishmash of stale gay jokes and situations completely undercut by the very premise of the film itself," writes Bill Zwecker in the Chicago Sun-Times. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times writes that "the movie resembles a game of Mother May I? in that for every tiny step it takes forward in the name of enlightenment ... it takes three giant steps back, often by piling on more jokes about gay sex." Jack Mathews makes the identical point in the New York Daily News. "It is," he writes, "an hour and a half of clichd gay jokes and 25 minutes of pro-gay apologies." Desson Thomas in the Washington Post comments that the film "takes a hot-button issue -- the cultural impact of gay marriage -- and treats it with such Stone Age sensibility, a Geico caveman would groan." And although the film has received an endorsement of sorts from the gay-activist group GLAAD, Claudia Puig in USA Today remarks that it is "laced with a heavy dose of homophobia, sexism and racism" while trying at the same time "to undercut its insulting story with some last-minute sappiness about tolerance and acceptance." Kyle Smith in the New York Post begins his review by commenting, "The movie isn't insulting to homosexuals but to comedy. As a hetero, I'm so embarrassed, I'm thinking of going undercover until this movie fades away." And Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun sums it all up this way: "Blechhh!"