The Animal
**
Cinema
Releases - November 2, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 84
minutes. Directed by Luke Greenfield. Written by Tom Brady, Rob Schneider;
from a story by Tom Brady. Starring Rob Schneider, Colleen Haskell, John
C. McGinley, Ed Asner, Michael Caton, Louis Lombardi.
Only a certain kind of movie can contain a line
like "Mmm, that's good badger milk." "The Animal" is that kind
of movie. Rob Schneider, he of "Saturday Night Live" and "Deuce Bigalow:
Male Gigolo", stars as Marvin, an out-of-shape loser who wants to be a cop
but doesn't have the physical or mental prowess. Marvin gets in a serious
car accident while trying to foil a crime, and ends up under the care of
a mad scientist who puts him back together with animal parts.
You should have guessed by now that Marvin's treatment
leads him to show animal characteristics, and "The Animal" is basically an
excuse to show Schneider making weird grunts, whinnying like a horse, sniffing
strange places, biting his own shoulder, making love to mailboxes, swimming
like an otter and urinating against chair legs in the middle of
restaurants.
Some of the things in this movie are so off-the-wall
that we can't help but smile. Most of them involve monkeys. There's also
a nice, sweet performance by Colleen Haskell, who plays the girl in Marvin's
life; she really seems to be existing in the role, which must have been quite
a feat, considering what's going on around her.
Schneider himself is an open-faced doofus who
we want to like. He prevents "The Animal" from being abominable, which it
would have been with a guy like Adam Sandler in the role -- although Sandler
was the executive producer, which imparts volumes of information about the
material before the movie even begins.
There were things I actively detested about this
movie -- the screenplay has an insulting role for a black man who thinks
everyone is discriminating against him by being too nice, and there are bizarre
random moments, such as when a journalist asks Schneider to guess what he
has up his butt, and it turns out to be car keys. But in general "The Animal"
is more of a weak picture than an annoying one. It's not a gross-out movie,
it's not a film that attempts wit; it's not anything, really, except a benign
little waste of time with a lot of strange noises.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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