Imagine a fun, infectious film that champions a repressed minority. Imagine a film that actually seems to respect that minority community and fully integrates it into the storyline, even granting the story’s principal victory to a member of that minority group. Imagine a morality tale that so gently communicates its message that it seems as natural as smiling, as healthy as laughing—or as liberating as dancing. And imagine a film that makes the case so eloquently that it’s easy to extrapolate the lesson to minorities of all stripes.

That movie is Hairspray, also being released this weekend. The minorities celebrated there are blacks, women, and overweight people.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, on the other hand, tries to accomplish all of those things for the minority gay community—and fails miserably.

Right out of the gate, the story is, at its heart, not about gay people at all, but about a very, very, very, very Neanderthal heterosexual male (Chuck) coming out of the Stone Age and into the relatively enlightened Dark Ages. Instead objectifying scores of women simultaneously, he learns how to objectify only one at a time.

This process of discovery is facilitated by Chuck’s sidekick Larry, whose wife has died. In order to secure his firefighter’s pension, he hatches a plan for the two buddies to masquerade as a domestic partnership—a gay couple, for those unfamiliar with the concept—in order to make sure that his trusted friend Chuck will be able to care for his two kids in the event that he also suffers an untimely death. So it’s only by pretending to be gay, for Larry’s sake, that Chuck learns to really appreciate being straight.

Along the way, of course, Chuck also learns to become less of a homophobe. And why not? Despite the fact that the film is studded with gay star cameos (such as Lance Bass and Richard Chamberlain), the gay people in this film are nothing more than wallpaper; and who could possibly be afraid of that? In this film, it’s only the heteros—Chuck and his bimbos—who seem the least bit interested in sex. I really can’t fathom why the gay community would get behind this film.

Worse yet, the film’s incredibly ill-humored comedy takes potshots at other minority groups such as Japanese, women, fat people, and narrow-minded evangelicals. It’s as if star Adam Sandler wanted to offend everyone except gay people, without featuring a single three-dimensional gay character—or any three-dimensional character at all besides his own Chuck—and while making it crystal clear that he’s not the slightest bit gay himself.

I honestly feared what I might say about this movie had it actually been decent. I need not have worried. I can’t imagine this film being more than a forgettable lark for any audience. At its best, all it celebrates is shallowness. At its worst, it’s execrable, like Norbit before it.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is rated PG-13 for “crude sexual content throughout, nudity, language and drug references.” Hmmm. I honestly can’t recall nudity other than some discreetly shot male shower sequences. And all of that “crude sexual content” is straight—lots of pointless shots of women in underwear. I mean, really: Is a straight male who gets off on women in thongs and push-up bras going to pay ten bucks to see a film about gay partnerships? And are gay males likely to get much mileage out of real female cleavage and butt shots? The filmmakers don’t seem to have any idea who this film is really for—but the odds are ten to one it’s not you.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a promotional screening of I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.