Crude intentions

Onkar Joshi

Slapstick, toilet humor and tons of dumb jokes! That’s The Animal for you.

Here's the dough:

Rob Schneider stars as Marvin, the dimwitted evidence file clerk for the Elkerton Police Department, who regularly fails in his attempts to pass the obstacle course that will make him a full-fledged officer of the law.

And there is Miles (Guy Torry), one of Marvin's loser buddies, a black man with a kind of 'backwards paranoia' (Miles suspects that every nice thing that happens to him is because of reverse racism).

Marvin gets involved in a nasty accident and is left for dead. But he gets operated upon with animal parts by a mad doctor and released back into public.

There are a lot of things one can think of, which would affect his behavior once the animal tendencies start taking over.

The film provides plenty of opportunities to indulge in silly, crude fun. But Rob Schneider and co-author Tom Brady don't take advantage of it.

The humour is tame, weak and diluted.

The Animal has a few exceptional moments with a few laughs.

However, the lead cast fail to deliver, as they only want to gross out the audience into laughter.

Talented actors like John C McGinley, Ed Asner and Louis Lombardi are wasted in half-baked supporting roles.

What goes wrong with The Animal is its inability to separate funny and gross. Like Schneider urinating at his girlfriend's door to mark his territory or using his keen sense of smell to sniff out a balloon of heroin up a smuggler's butt. Crude stuff, this.

Fortunately Haskell, the non-actress who came to fame eating rats on a beach in the South China Sea (Survivor) saves the day.

Though she gets limited footage, she is the only worthwhile part on this otherwise shoddy project.

Like every Adam Sandler film, The Animal has the stamp of proud, mindless stupidity that is so like him.

Schneider, Sandler's Saturday Night Live buddy, exudes the same kind of mindless stupidity, as you are expected to laugh because of the way he deals with his head being whacked by a blunt instrument every five minutes of the film.

Unless you find THAT funny, stay away from The Animal.