This, of course, is a great shock for both of them, but it
is on Jessica (now looking like Clive but, nbelievably, still
insisting on wearing her own clothes, despite her new, muscular
frame) that most of the action focuses, as she and her best-friend,
April (Anna Faris, whose range almost stretches from to A to
B) set out to reunite Jessica's body and soul, through the retrieval
and re-pairing of the missing earring with its twin.
What follows is a standard high-school-pic-by-numbers adventure
that allows Schneider to perform a series of gender-confused
set-pieces - Jessica has to take on a man in a fist fight, has
to learn to pee standing up and has to cope with bodily odour
and hair - while the rest of the cast look on in wide-eyed amazement.
Co-written by Schneider and director Tom Brady, who worked
together on The Animal and NBC's Men Behaving Badly, The Hot
Chick is a lazy, sloppily constructed film that, for the most
part, falls flat.
Not only because too much is invested in the slim talents of
Schneider, at the expense of the superior McAdams, but also
because of a storyline that has more holes in it than a piece
of Emmental, and humour that is so pathetically clichéd
and contrived that even confirmed gross-out movie fans may find
it simply too stupid to laugh at.
