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The easiest way to convey how terrible The Hot Chick
is starts at the very end of the film, when the credits role.
Those in the audience who haven’t bolted from the theater
are treated to outtakes of Rob Schneider screwing up
a scene. He doesn’t flub his existing lines, he simply can’t
remember what he’s supposed to say next and he’s too stupid
to ad lib anything funny. Over and over, Schneider keeps twirling
his finger in his hair, trying to remember the next line.
The repetitious outtakes are so unfunny they quickly become
unbearable to watch, and they pretty much summarize how bad
this film is; if the scenes on the cutting room floor aren’t
any good, it’s a safe bet what got left in won’t be much better.
The plot involves the body-switching drama between Jessica
(McAdams) and Clive (Schneider). To borrow a line from
the TV advertising blitz for this dud, Jessica “has it all.”
She’s a luscious babe who drives a sporty new car, hangs out
with a coterie of hot-bodied 17-year-olds, and dates the sensitive
and impossibly good-looking high school quarterback. Through
some mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus she ends up with the body of
Clive, a slovenly criminal who happens to cross Jessica’s
path while he’s robbing a local gas station and she’s demanding
full service at the pump.
The usual gender-bender double entendre jokes ensue as Jessica
struggles to figure out why this switcheroo happened in the
first place, what she can do to get her old body back, and,
of course, how she manages to negotiate her new body. What
the latter mostly involves are bad jokes about the difficulties
of peeing with a newly acquired appendage.
To call this film another insipid teen comedy would be to
insult the genre. It pretends to suggest what matters is who
we are inside, not the bodies we possess, but in fact all
this film does is perpetuate negative stereotypes about homosexuals,
immigrants, women, and obesity. For instance, some of the
characters Jessica initially insults are later incorporated
into her entourage as she tries to reverse the bodily spell.
True, this represents an improvement from some teen comedies
of the past where anyone who doesn’t fit the Barbie ideal
is treated derisively. In The Hot Chick, the heavy-set
high schooler is no longer made fun of and treated as an outcast;
instead she is welcomed into Jessica’s clique of perfect looking
friends. Yet she is only known to the audience by her last
name, Hildenberg, an obvious reference to a blimp. In another
running gag, Schneider takes on the identity of a Mexican
migrant, and here too we get another one-dimensional performance
that simplifies the ethnicity of Mexican Americans as tortilla-eating
gardeners. But the worst affront of all comes through in Schneider’s
embodiment of “female.” As a woman trapped in a man’s body
Schneider simply resorts to gross caricatures of extreme femininity:
swinging his hips, jumping up and down excitedly about cheerleader
competitions, or sighing about a broken fingernail. Regardless
of what its title suggests, The Hot Chick is in fact
quite the opposite. It’s closer to a bad egg.
—Nancy Semin
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out of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
