I'm not a big fan of the original Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Rob Schneider amuses me with his little Adam Sandler-film cameos, but I've had a hard time with his solo projects. He just doesn't strike me as funny enough to carry his own film. I always saw him as a weak link during his Saturday Night Live years.
European Gigolo is actually better than its predecessor, with some decent R-rated laughs and an anything-goes attitude. The moments that focus exclusively on Deuce and his new love interest are horrible, dragging the film down into the depths of bad-movie hell. When the movie strays off that subject and focuses on the members of the hilarious International Man-Whore Association, it's actually quite funny.
When the movie opens, Schneider is mourning over the death of his wife, eaten by sharks on their honeymoon. He winds up in Amsterdam, meeting up with his pimp friend T.J. (Eddie Griffin, playing the character this movie should've been about), who lives on a houseboat that is one more leak from sinking.
A man-whore killer is on the loose, and T.J. gets pegged as the main suspect when he's photographed trying to check out the legendary unit of the recently murdered Heinz Hummer, post mortem (he's labeled as "extremely gay" by the press). Deuce must return to man-whoring, investigating all the strange European women who frequent man-whores, in order to find the true killer. He does this to clear his friend's name and set the film up for a parade of disgusting sight gags involving the freakish clientele.
There's the veil-wearing unfortunate woman with a penis for a nose (guess what happens when she sneezes) and the extremely large woman who can't have babies (guess what role Deuce must play during sex games). These sequences get a little tiresome--and intensely gross. Sure, they squeeze out a couple of laughs, but the prevailing sensation is nausea.
While the movie (which logs in at an astoundingly low 83 minutes) has many clunkers and dead ends, it does have some big laughs. The members of the Man-Whore Association take their jobs very seriously, discussing sexual moves like "the dirty sanchez" as if they were golf tips. When a dancing gigolo comes out to perform one of his famed, and allegedly wet, sex moves at the Man-Whore Awards, people in the front row don rain parkas as if they were at a Gallagher show.
Griffin is always funny here, and the film would've benefited from giving him more screen time. A scene where he eats french fries out of a toilet, and then gets attacked by a testicle-obsessed cat, is much funnier than it deserves to be.
Schneider himself has his moments. The opening minutes of the film are very funny, when a Deuce mishap leads to a bunch of visually impaired elderly people getting attacked by dolphins. But for every joke that works, there are two that don't. A running gag involving Deuce's late wife's prosthetic leg gets tired fast, and Schneider's "smelly finger dance" is lame beyond description.
If you want to see somebody consume soup with a mystery ingredient that's known to cause babies, then, by all means, indulge. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo might not be a good movie, but it does have some genuine laughs, and that's good enough for some. It's hard to totally pan a film inhabited by a Greek man-whore named Assapopoulos.
