'European Gigolo': Don't Call Me

Lord knows, I've tried to love Rob Schneider, giving him the benefit of the doubt (and what may well be the best reviews of his life) for "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and "The Animal," two crude comedies that at least managed to elicit a few hearty, if lowbrow, laughs. Up to now, my appreciation of the actor was due in no small measure to his trademark genial-loser persona, which seemed to apologize for itself even as it flaunted its silliness.

But do I really need to see, as we do in the sequel, "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo," a woman with a penis for a nose "sneezing" into someone's soup and then watch that soup get eaten? Or, worse yet, to imagine that same character's strange endowment getting stuck in another woman's tracheotomy hole? (Thankfully, this occurs off-camera.)

Maybe I'm getting too old for this stuff, but the new film -- which follows retired male "prosti-dude" Deuce's (Schneider) efforts to clear his former pimp's (Eddie Griffin) name when the manager is accused of murder by the Amsterdam police -- feels less like a celebration of anarchic smut than a joyless entry in a gross-out contest designed for the (presumably) stoned teenage male fans of body-part and body-fluid humor.

Sure, I laughed. (What can I say? I'm weak.) But afterward I felt used and dirty in a way I never had before. As he did in the first "Deuce Bigalow" film, Schneider's character talks a lot about how his customers want more than a piece of meat. With this latest exercise in cynicism, however, it's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (R, 77 minutes) -- Contains obscenity, partial nudity, crude humor, sex and drug use and comic violence. Area theaters.