Another Hellishly Painful Experience

When is Adam Sandler going to grow up?

Little Nicky, the comic's latest, is as brutally painful as having a pineapple shoved up your ass. And that's just the type of toilet-bowl slapstick that dominates this ill-conceived vehicle, from Hitler taking the aforementioned citrus up the rear-end to a talking dog making water on an "I love acting" doormat. It's an all-too-apt metaphor for Sandler himself, whose performance and script are an insult to the profession as well as the intelligence of the average member of his audience.

Although Sandler's previous farces have stooped no lower than being just plain stupid, Little Nicky trolls the intellectual ghetto for every last ounce of tastelessness. Sandler's slant-headed son of Satan, sent from hell to capture his brothers and save his father from certain death, rambles through a world fraught with transvestite humor, chauvinism and humorless sacrilege that includes priests cussing their cathedral audiences and heaven turning into a sorority house. The religious schtick isn't so much offensive as merely unfunny, and it's bolstered only by attempted yuks from anal rape by giant birds and devils growing boobs on their heads.

While Billy Madison and its ilk at least made good use of his limited comic talents, Little Nicky's slapdash plot sheds poor light on Sandler's penchant for snickering inanity. The appeal of watching a grown man amble around talking like a mealy-mouthed moron amid a sea of reductionist fart jokes has fallen exponentially with each of Sandler's tired films. At least the movie makes almost incessant plugs for Popeye's Chicken (which did not sponsor the film). After all, if he makes another flick this rotten, Sandler had better start looking at the only day job a professional jackass can handle.