Metacritic Film

Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo

Starring Rob Schneider, Norm Macdonald, Arija Bareikis, Allen Covert, Eddie Griffin, Arija Bareikis, Oded Fehr, and Gail O'Grady

MPAA RATING: R for sexual content, language and crude humor

Buena Vista Pictures
Comedy
88 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters December 10, 1999

A fish tank cleaner (Schneider) becomes a male gigolo after being mistaken for one while housesitting a male gigolo's house.

WRITTEN BY
Harris Goldberg
Rob Schneider

DIRECTED BY
Mike Mitchell

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

30 / 100

Critic Reviews

63 Baltimore Sun
Surprisingly funny, a deep-down-good-hearted take on that oldest of comedy conventions, the ill-prepared rube caught up in a situation that somehow never gets the best of him.
63 New York Post
It's not to say that the adolescent humor isn't funny; some of it is hilarious. It's just that this movie lacks the overarching comic sensibility that made "Mary" and even Adam Sandler comedies like "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy" so satisfying.
63 San Francisco Examiner
If you buy the gross, it's surprisingly funny .
63 Boston Globe Joan Anderman
Schneider's mild-mannered fish-lover is genuinely likable, and a good-natured foil to the crude jokes.
63 Charlotte Observer Chris Hewitt
It's choppy and cheap-looking, and it has dead spots like the Sahara, but it also has a surprising number of genuinely funny bits, most of them slapsticky and gleefully rude.
60 Washington Post
A considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other 'SNL' alums.
50 Mr. Showbiz
To paraphrase the movie's too-knowing tag line: It's not very funny. But when the lights go out -- it's still not very funny.
50 TV Guide
It's actually a sweet, often very funny story about a schlemiehl redeemed by love.
50 LA Weekly
It's short, this movie, an attribute Sandler himself might take heed of, and if the teenagers in the back row are laughing harder and more often, you might at least find yourself smiling (guiltily) every few minutes.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
The lowdown on Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Rob Schneider's first starring role, is that it is. Lowdown, that is.
40 Film.com
Rob Schneider's stab at an "Ace Ventura"-like gamble for stardom.
38 Chicago Sun-Times
I laughed, yes, I did, several times during Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That's proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity.
38 USA Today
A pathetically dumb attempt to string a bunch of second-rate skits together like a garland of rotten cranberries.
35 TNT RoughCut Mike Mitchell
The kind of surprising giggles that make you wonder why you're laughing--- that's worth a few bucks.
30 Los Angeles Times
Only the innate sweetness of both its lead character and its base premise keeps you from wanting to slap Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo upside its mangy, empty head.
30 Chicago Reader
After loosening us up with some irresistible shtick that rigorously fulfills genre expectations, the movie subtly, systematically begins to break down familiar tropes in the depiction of attractiveness, attraction, and heterosexual courtship.
25 Philadelphia Inquirer
The jokes are unabashedly pitched at 12-year-old boys, with flatulence, masturbation and excretions as the leading themes.
25 Entertainment Weekly
Just when you're sure that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo can't get any less funny, the movie douses the trailer's best gag, as that prosthetic leg turns out to be attached to Deuce's true love.
25 Miami Herald
He's (Sandler) trying to clone himself by supporting his buddies in making low-budget, high-grossing -- in all senses of the word -- formula films just like his own.
25 Chicago Tribune
Custom-designed for 13 year-olds, laden with broad sight gags, gross sound effects and a bowlful of potty jokes.
20 Variety
A sign that the Sandler comedy empire is expanding and reaching new depths of pure gross-out stupidity.
20 Austin Chronicle
Mitchell's film would be another example of why former SNL cast members should choose their scripts wisely, except that Schneider wrote this one.
20 The New York Times
Juvenile comedy targets a gallery of imperfect women.
16 Portland Oregonian
It's as sullying and disheartening an experience as the movies can offer .
16 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
An insufferably insipid comedy with a cruel subtext.
0 New York Daily News
A little Disney Christmas release that comes wrapped in used toilet paper.

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