I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Comedy

Adam Sandler	Chuck Ford
Kevin James	Larry Allensworth
Shelby Adamowsky	Tori Valentine
Dan Aykroyd	Captain P. Tucker
Jessica Biel	Alex McDonough
John Boyd	Criminal
Steve Buscemi	Clinton Fitzer
Ving Rhames	Fred G. Duncan
Nicholas Turturro	Renaldo Pinera
Allen Covert	Steve
Rachel Dratch	Benefits Supervisor
Richard Chamberlain	Councilman Banks

Director	Dennis Dugan
Producer	Barry Bernardi; Michael Bostick; Tom Shadyac; Jack Giarraputo
Writer	Barry Fanaro; Alexander Payne; Jim Taylor

This is a tale of two firemen and best friends, Chuck Ford (Adam Sandler) and Larry Allensworth (Kevin James), who are renown for their very male attitudes and behavior around the firehouse. Although good friends, they are quite different in their lives away from work. Chuck is a womanizer and Larry, a widower, is devoted to his kids. In return for saving his life in a fire, Larry asks Chuck for an incredible favor: Marriage. Complications with insurance coverage force Larry to seek a loophole. Unfortunately, their little secret gets out and they must not only move in together, but are forced to fake true love and admiration for each other, if only to fool the insurance company.

It's crude and sometimes awkward, but there's a gleefully subversive movie lurking inside I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. By virtue of a tooth-grinding contrivance, two manly Manhattan firefighters, Adam Sandler and Kevin James, must move in together and pretend to be gay; after seeing life from the other side, they learn something about tolerance. Sandler is the obnoxious, aggressively offensive womanizer, while James plays a widowed dad worried about his effeminate son. Nothing is too surprising about the way this works out, except for the film's unabashedly gay-rights fervor. It's one thing for a sensitive art-house movie to preach to the choir, and quite another for Sandler to speak to his multiplex audience on how uncool it is to use a homophobic slur. Ham-handedly directed and almost proudly sloppy, Chuck & Larry wins points for remaining defiantly rude; a nicer movie wouldn't have been as effective. There's a hilarious supporting performance by Ving Rhames, and Jessica Biel brings her Kim Novak-style glamour to a truly unbelievable character. Rob Schneider and Richard Chamberlain (two names not generally brought together) are amusing in small roles. --Robert Horton