Director: Luke Greenfield
Starring: Rob Schneider, Colleen Haskell, Ed Asner, Michael Caton

Throughout its twenty-plus years on American television, ‘Saturday Night Live’ has produced some of the most important figures in screen comedy — legends such as Jon Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Myers to name just seven. But at the same time there have been countless hangers-on in the SNL cast who have dragged it through years of torturous sketches without punch lines. Among the worst offenders is Rob Schneider, a man who has done little but hang onto the coattails of more talented co-stars but has somehow ended up as one of the key leading men of the current batch of SNL alumni. ‘The Animal’ is formulaic gross-out comedy of the simplest kind — it may raise a few guffaws along the way, but you won’t remember a single line to quote the next day.

So this is what it says on the packet: Schneider, star of ‘Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo’, is Marvin Mange, a loser of the losingest kind — a guy who gets beaten up by six year-olds. Marvin, a lowly evidence clerk at the local police station, dreams of being a policeman like his dead father, but can’t conquer the obstacle course/granny bashing required to earn his badge. When he drives off of a cliff while trying to avoid a performing seal in the middle of the road, his injuries are so bad that there is no way he can survive. Unless, of course, a mad scientist (Michael Caton, on a break from ‘Hot Auctions’) comes along and replaces the broken bits with animal parts.

Remembering nothing of his surgery, Marvin returns to the police force, but his heightened animal senses and ability to smell what’s secreted away in the butt of a drug smuggler soon see him elevated to the status of supercop. There’s always a catch, however — the new animal instincts are running out of control, and Marvin is losing himself to the animals inside. Cue hilarious set-pieces involving sex with goats, sex with mailboxes, fisticuffs with angry orang-utans and meals of chewed up worms.

As much as it pains this reviewer to say this, Rob Schneider is no Adam Sandler. The halfway decent ick-factor comedies of Sandler, David Spade and the late, very great Chris Farley did much to resurrect the ailing reputation of SNL-related films in the mid-nineties. Schneider was always the lesser light in this lesser group of talent, and his attempts at a similar style of humour suggest that he was better off as their supporting player. The dumb-ass movie is a delicate art form, and those who make them cannot afford to be dumb-asses themselves — Schneider would do well to realise this.

It seems Caton’s scientist threw in a little bit of every animal in existence, and logically Marvin inherits the skills and instincts of all of them oSchneider gets to go through his full bestiary of impressions, swimming like a dolphin while sprinting like a cheetah and shagging mailboxes like a rabbit. Not that rabbits shag mailboxes. Much.

The focus of the more Freudian aspect of his animal nature is on local animal-lover and greeny tree-hugger Rianna (Colleen Haskell, last seen as the eleventh member of ‘Survivor’ to be voted off the island). Laughs ensue as Rianna takes our irrepressible animal out on a date to the localOe wait for itOe vegetarian restaurant! Haskell is surprisingly likeable, although her total lack of acting experience is painfully obvious at times. Nevertheless, playing opposite Rob Schneider means that it does not take much to stand out — many of the animals use this to their advantage.

It can be too easy to savage films like ‘The Animal’ for being too dumb for the tastes of the average critic, but the problem here is that it’s dumb done bad. Schneider, and first-time director-for-hire Luke Greenfield, need to look at some of the countless dumb comedy classics made by his fellow SNL graduates and take a few pointers on how to do it with style. May I suggest they start with ‘Animal House’ and work from there?