The Hot Chick Review

The Hot Chick is the version for non-connoisseurs of Prelude To A Kiss, the Alec Baldwin - Meg Ryan stamped seal of class that depicted a romance that goes awry when the bride accidentally swaps bodies with an old man at her wedding. In less euphemistic terms, it means that if you are only so evolved, then The Hot Chick has exactly the kind of humor you find appealing, and delightfully lacks any of the subtlety hosted by those award-nominated movies you assiduously side-step around. It seems to be drawing good crowds - that in sad Skyline, with all its loutish and corrupt staff. Chicago, then, isn't exactly buzzing at Sangeet. Ahem.

That said, the film does keep you vacillating between giggles and guffaws, with the kind of humor that you'd find extremely funny if you were 16 and had no intention of growing up. Made primarily for teenage girls and other victims of arrested development, the film narrates the tale of sprightly prom queen Jessica (Rachel McAdams), popular with friends but a delightful target for a hit-and-run accident with all her not-so-cool co-eds she regularly keeps quaffing.

After gypping a forbidden pair of mystical earrings from an antique shop and losing one of them that's then found by a 100% ethics-free oaf Clive (Rob Schneider), Jessica wakes up to find herself in a completely new formula body - yes, that of Clive. And sure enough, Clive is wrapped in Jessica's. The back-end logic is that two persons simultaneously wearing one each of this extra-power pair of earrings swap bodies.

Everyone who's in this situation will tell you what parts of his new anatomy he is most impressed by, and director Tom Brady is no exception. No, we're not saying he's in this situation (we don't know anything about that!) - it's just that he's very impressed by those parts of Jessica's and Clive's new anatomies, considering how much of the rest of the flick he dedicates to them. And so you have Jessica putting on a strip tease for all of her friends who want to know if she "really has one", waking up to a - er - stiffness, practicing urinating with her new apparatus several times in the film etc.

The film does try to get on a higher plane as it shows Jessica repenting the bitch she's been to her less-happening schoolmates, healing her parents' breaking marriage, realizing the importance of the small things in life she's taken for granted etc., but those parts don't have enough obscene jokes, and thereby deviate from the objective of the film and don't cut ice with the target audience.

Rod Schneider as a teenaged girl delivers a decent performance, but in economy. Most of the reason for that is the colossal under-utilization of the significant comic possibilities that the premise offers. The film's jokes are based mostly on the physical differences between males and females, and considering that even these are average and oh-so-predictable, the movie emerges as the non-intellectual's version of even the Austin Powers series. And so there are hardly any scenes or dialogues that you'll remember 10 minutes after. To top it all, the film is in 35mm!

A surprise appearance in the film is by Adam Sandler, who, thankfully, is wasted. The film has enough sad jokes already, you don't need one more!