Little Nicky

Saying Little Nicky is the worst Adam Sandler movie yet would be like comparing piles of shit and picking one as the stinkiest. While I'm sure Sandler's fans love to do this, I've got better things to do, like get alcohol poisoning or jab a rusty nail into my foot. This is just Sandler's latest lazy "fuck you" to the general public, a movie that could have and should have been funny if anyone involved had bothered to try. Sandler movies are not for people who love movies. They are for people who love to sit down and waste two hours because they don't have any plans before death.

Sandler is the innocent, head-banging son of Satan (Harvey Keitel). Keitel has two other sons (Rhys Ilfans and Tiny Lister), both of whom want to rule Hell. When Keitel announces he'll rule for another 10,000 years (coincidentally, about how long this 90 minute turd feels), Sandler's brothers become so furious they escape to create their own hell on earth. Their departure from the underworld freezes the gates of hell and no new souls can get in. Without new souls Keitel will wither and die, so he sends Sandler to earth to retrieve his brothers. On earth, Sandler is befriended by a talking dog and discovers the heavenly pleasures of love with the truly execrable Patricia Arquette.

That's right: this movie features a talking dog who pisses on shit, exposes his balls and has to say huge blocks of exposition. That alone qualifies Little Nicky as an ass-reamer of a flick, but Sandler's just getting his rusty rod lubed.

The plot sounds like it might have made a decent comedy in the hands of a competent crew, but it isn't with Sandler, his gay lover (I'm assuming) Tim Herlihy and director Steven Brill at the wheel. Herlihy and Sandler have joined forces to make powerfully bad movies before, and Brill brings the skills he learned making the fat-kid summer camp movie "Heavyweights" (the fat kids win!) and writing the David Arquette pussy-fart "Ready to Rumble." New Line Cinema gave this trio $60 million or whatever the fuck it took to make this? Jesus Christ, investing that in an on-line company that sells pet dildos is a smarter investment in quality.

They lay it out so fucking lazily I could almost hear the trio say "good enough" on a dozen occasions. Where real movies try to tell a new story in a new way that surprises us while still making sense, these fuckers keep painting themselves into corners and then burping up bullshit, inconsistent solutions that practically scream "we're fucking lazy and we'll throw in anything."

The dialog is bloody horseshit, alternating between big chunks of exposition falling out of characters' mouths like concrete blocks and jokes that go nowhere. Good, conscientious writers tell stories that the audience can follow without having to explain it every ten minutes, "This is what just happened, and that means in the next ten minutes we will have to do this."

There wasn't a single joke in Little Nicky that made me laugh. The one moderately amusing gag, where a man grows a nice rack of tits on his head, is repeatedly beaten like dirty rug, pounded and pounded until any speck of humor is gone. The rest of the jokes will appeal to a certain audience, and that audience is mostly in prison for buttfucking animals. In Hell, Hitler gets a pineapple up his ass each day. How long do you think it took Sandler and Herlihy to think up as clever an idea as that Hitler is in Hell? Sandler's Son of Satan likes Popeye's chicken. That's the joke, and I am still at a complete loss to explain what's funny about it, especially after it's done twenty times. Is it funny that devils like Popeye's? Is it funny that Sandler does? What the fuck's the joke?

Steve Brill has the directorial flash and sense of style of a young Janet Reno. His pacing is flatter than my grandpa's cardiogram, with no hints to Sandler's mentally-challenged demographic as to when to laugh or care. Many terrible verbal jokes received complete silence in the full theater I was in and could have used a laugh-track. The plot plods along until an expensive-looking finale, by which time the audience has been jerked around so much it doesn't care anymore.

There are many cameos in this movie, but they aren't fun. It's like Little Nicky is the welfare line for Saturday Night Live stars we hoped we'd never have to see again. After all, if we did want to see them, they'd be in their own shitty movies. Kevin Nealon, Ellen Cleghorne, Dana Carvey, John Lovitz, David Spade and Rob "I suck" Schneider all pop up in roles where the main joke is that they were once famous. For fuck's sake, they weren't funny on SNL, so what's funny about them not having good jokes here? Other unfunny cameos include Quentin Tarantino as a blind evangelist, Rodney Dangerfield as Grandpa Satan, Michael McKean. Cameos are not funny unless the people have something funny to do. To be fair, Reese Witherspoon's cameo as a sorority-like angel could have been funny if Brill had the slightest idea how to tell a joke.

The characters are all limper than a cold dick . Sandler goes through the movie lisping out of half his mouth, and wearing huge down coats. This is part of the "humor" and maybe it was funny to him and Herlihy when they were stoned and writing it. But, again, I don't get the fucking joke. Little Nicky's roommate is also a black hole of comedy. A middle-aged, vaguely gay man who likes acting is not funny unless he has something funny to do, which this movie never gives him. Same goes for the two heavy metal longhairs who show up halfway into the story. Their lines and behavior are, I'm guessing, supposed to be amusing, but Sandler and Herlihy must have been too busy cashing their checks to actually write any jokes for them.

LittleNicky is a royal ass-fucking with a dirty fence post from Sandler and New Line Cinema, both of whom don't give a flying fuck about you or me. They just want our money, and I say we stop giving it to them. One finger.