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I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Universal Pictures Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (3rd August 2009). |
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The Film
 I hate Kevin James. I’m not sure how his style of comedy caught on to become deserving of the fame and success he’s enjoyed. I used to like Adam Sandler, back in his childish days when he was content to make stupid voices, fart jokes, and nonsense for about an hour and a half in the 90’s. Around the time of his turn to drama in “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002) his comedies got less and less funny, leading up to “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry” (2007) which is one of the least funny movies I’ve ever seen. At first I thought it may have been that the early Sandler movies just came out at the right time and my sense of humor to hit me in the right place, but those comedies tend to hold up a lot better than you would expect. Adding Kevin James into the mix with a current Adam Sandler spells disaster. Combining that with a movie that’s one long gay joke is a tragedy. After watching the entire movie, I realize this is a comedic failure of monumental proportions, there is no redeeming value to this movie whatsoever and the fact that it perpetuates the thought that Kevin James should have a Hollywood acting career is even worse. Chuck (Adam Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James) are a pair of best-friend New York firefighters who lead separate lives. Chuck is a womanizing ladies man who manages to have sex with just about every woman he comes into contact with, while Larry is a widower with two children who still hasn’t gotten over the death of his wife. While Larry is trying to organize his pension to best support his children, he discovers that he failed to file the proper forms in time meaning his children cannot be named as the primary beneficiaries. Larry decides to call in a favor from his best friend Chuck to enter into a domestic partnership by getting married in Canada and filing the appropriate forms in the States. After the two move in, they hire a lawyer (Jessica Biel) to help defend against the city investigating their marriage as they suspect it to be a fraud. Soon the two are involved within the gay community (or some semblance of it) and keeping up their act until they are discriminated against by their fellow firefighters. The mildly homophobic humor is still there, and all over the place, jokes I expected that reinforce sterotype at the same time the movie puts in a fairly generic anti-homophobic plot that doesn’t really challenge anything but the most blatant homophobia. However the film seems open to that sort of criticism, like with its’ special advanced screening for GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). Despite this awareness, at best the film is a gigantic backhanded compliment that keeps every gay joke that you would expect while supplementing it with a few short segments about how homophobia is wrong. If anything though that means the film is aware of it’s homophobic stereotypes and casual sexism with a splatter of racism. Rob Schneider’s yellowface performance conjures up U.S. propaganda posters from World War II attacking General Tojo. With this racist character played by Schneider, whose character is known only as “Asian Minister” the film, it destroys any sort of progressive angle that the film hopes to achieve in affirming gay relationships by perpetuating racist steroytpes. So now that I know the film has no redeeming social value, how about the acting? Ving Rhames was Okay. Jessica Biel did what she was hired to do, look attractive and play a shallow character. I still hate James and Sandler and they haven't gotten any funnier. Schneider hopefully didn’t get much money for the film, but he may spend it all by taking out full page newspaper ads to rail against critics of his next film. “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry” reunites Sandler with Dennis Dugan, who also directed “Happy Gilmore” (1996) and a handful of other “Saturday Night Live” (1971-Present) alumni movies. His visual styles haven’t come very far in the 11 years since “Happy Gilmore” and for a comedy he just does a functional job of showing the actors, showing the appropriate segments for a sight gag and pulling the exact mediocre performances needed out of all of the actors. Overall the film just isn’t funny, the jokes don’t hit and the movie runs about two hours longer than it should have. James is still unfunny and his friendship with Sandler will drag him into more movie roles and keep the laughs calm. Schneider’s racist performance keeps bothering me beyond the screen as it got so quickly brushed over in the talk about the movie.
Video
Like most of the bad movies on Blu-ray the film has an uncanny visual clarity for the most part. The 1080p 24/fps 1.85:1 transfer with VC-1 encoding brings a fair contrast to the film, and bring through the colors nicely in most scenes. However in the AIDS benefit/birthday party scene that has the most flashing colors and dimmed lighting the grain becomes more apparent and the clarity goes down. Still it’s a nice Blu-ray transfer with a few disappointments, but overall keeps the high level of contrast, clarity and visual goodness that you would expect from high-definition, without going the extra mile to make everything look beautiful.
Audio
With the English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit it's similarly polishes this failure of a comedy with a good sound mix to let you hear the lack of jokes and comedy present in the film. The sound moves as it should and brings the right clarity and balance between the ambient noises, dialogue and audio with out making anything really sound off. Some of the sound effects added in afterwards for comedic effect just get more annoying as they pop out from the soundtrack, as intended, but since there’s nothing funny there it’s just an extra noise that delays the eventual ending of the film. Optional French and Spanish DTS 5.1 digital surround tracks are also available with English for the hearing impaired, French and Spanish subtitles.
Extras
This single disc release brings together two audio commentary tracks and a U-control feature. The first audio commentary is with director Dennis Dugan and cast members Adam Sandler and Kevin James. This commentary doesn’t feature quite as much banter and is poorly produced in terms of sound as the audio from the film doesn’t quite fade behind the commentary track and the volume on the commentary track isn’t up as high as it should be. Sandler and James tend to banter back and forth, calling Sandler ‘sandman’ at every opportunity, while making jokes about things that go on in the movie. It’s not terribly interesting, they talk about their lives and just talk about things that happen in the movie without much insight. The jokes aren’t funnier than the movie itself and Dugan sort of disappears into the background as James and Sandler chat and pause every once in a while to watch the film. Suffering from the same production problems as the first audio commentary, this second track with director Dennis Dugan, where he repeats what little bits of information that he brought into the first commentary but with more pauses and less stabs at comedy by Sandler and James. It’s not a very interesting commentary, especially considering the movie itself isn’t really visually interesting, but he tries to talk up how good the green screen looks on the firetruck, but you can see how CG the entire scene is as he’s talking about it. Finally is a “Friendship Test” which is a U-Control feature that just provides a three-option multiple choice question at random points in the film supposedly testing the viewer’s friendship and giving them a score at the end. Shorter and more entertaining tests can be found easily online, making it an incredibly useless feature, especially with the capacity of Blu-ray.
Overall
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