The Animal

Utterly innocuous and instantly forgettable, Rob Schneider's latest quickie is perhaps most useful as a kind of babysitter, a film you can dump your kids off at the mall to see in order to get peace and quiet for an hour and a half. Essentially, it's an extended Saturday Night Live sketch based on the premise that animal organ transplants will give their recipient animal characteristics. Come to think of it, SNL's Goat Boy (Jim Breuer) was based on virtually the same gag. Whereas a director and producer with some imagination could probably have crafted a decent superhero parody from this setup, first-time helmer Luke Greenfield doesn't appear to have been given much time or money, leaving Schneider to fill the screen with animal noises for 90 minutes. There's one funny running gag about affirmative action, and Schneider is thankfully less snide than partner in crime Adam Sandler (who coproduced), but as is always the case in Sandler productions, the funniest moment of the movie is the obligatory Norm MacDonald cameo (strange how Norm's never funny in his own movies). The Animal actually manages to even fall short of the comedic standards set by Schneider's own Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. John C. McGinley is wasted as the de facto villain of the piece, and Survivor's Colleen Haskell as the love interest is cute, but she's no actor. Not that that matters much in this case.