The Hot Chick (2002)
Directed by Tom Brady
Written by Tom Brady, Rob Schneider
Starring Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris, Matthew Lawrence, Eric Christian Olson
Release Date December 13th, 2002
Published December 13th, 2002
To call a Rob Schneider movie juvenile and stupid is like looking at the sky and saying it's blue or saying water is wet. When you go see a Rob Schneider movie, you have to expect low-grade humor aimed at the 14-year-old-male demographic. Expect there to be a multitude of fart jokes, and various other references to bodily functions. There will also be genuinely funny moments and a cameo by Adam Sandler. So far, this formula has yet to yield an entertaining picture, but with the small number of laughs culled from his latest effort, The Hot Chick, the potential for a truly funny movie exists.
In The Hot Chick, a gorgeous high school cheerleader named Jessica (Rachel McAdams) rules her school with a scathing wit and disregard for her classmates' feelings. Jessica's life is perfect: she is head cheerleader, likely to be the prom queen, and she is in love with the star quarterback (Matthew Lawrence). Of course, karma has it in for this chick and it strikes when she steals a pair of ancient earrings from an unusual shop in the mall. The earrings' backstory, explained at the beginning of the film, is that they belonged to a woman who was promised into a marriage she did not want.
Therefore, she uses the earrings' mystical power to trade bodies with a peasant girl. After Jessica loses one of the earrings and it is found by a petty criminal named Clive (Schneider), she wakes up in Clive's body and vice versa. Desperate for help, she seeks out her best friend April (Scary Movie's Anna Faris) for help. Not surprisingly April doesn't believe the strange man in front of her is her best friend but after some intimate details are shared, April realizes that this is indeed Jessica.
We have seen this set up before. In fact, in the 1980s, the body switching stuff was a genre unto its own. Anyone remember Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore in Like Father Like Son or Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage in Vice Versa or George Burns and Charlie Schlatter in 18 Again? (And the list goes on and on.) Schneider and his co-writer/director Tom Brady do not do anything to improve upon this lame genre; merely adding gross-out jokes is not my idea of improvement. Still, Schneider's game performance has its moments, and McAdams really shines as the bitchy cheerleader.
The Hot Chick is not a very good movie but it's not nearly as bad as your average Schneider/Sandler offering. It's slightly tamer than anything he's done before, and it has some genuinely funny moments; not nearly enough laughs for me to recommend it, but not so bad as to be avoided at all costs.
