From left: Chuck Levine (Adam Sandler) and Larry Valentine (Kevin James) team up as two straight guys who stumble down the aisle with the best of intentions.

(AP):

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is a one-joke movie and that joke might have seemed edgy back in 1977 when Billy Crystal was playing a gay man on Soap.

Adam Sandler and likeable lug Kevin James play Brooklyn firefighters who pretend they're a couple to receive domestic partner benefits. This sets up a litany of obvious gags and adolescent one-liners, followed by a swift, politically correct embrace of gay culture.

Director Dennis Dugan (Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, says no more) wants to have it both ways but never gets either right. It might seem offensive if it wasn't so lame.

Sandler's Chuck Levine and James' Larry Valentine try to convince the world they're gay by picking up Wham and Barry Manilow CDs and professing they're "riding the dude train". They do this because Larry, a widower, is concerned his kids won't receive life insurance if he dies in a fire. Among the flat subplots, Larry's young daughter is a tomboy who loves baseball, while his son is practicing his tap routine to audition for Pippin.

Suddenly, their fellow firefighters stop playing pickup basketball with them and feel nervous about showering around them. And while a fraud inspector (Steve Buscemi in a weasly, unfunny role) starts snooping around, their captain at the fire station (Dan Aykroyd) doesn't want to know the truth.

So Chuck and Larry enlist the help of attorney Alex McDonough (Jessica Biel) to help them defend their case. Trouble is, Alex is astonishingly hot and Chuck in his previous life was a ravenous ladies' man. And so he agrees to be her buddy on shopping sprees and girlie wine nights just to be close to her.

The most baffling part of all is that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, the Oscar-winning Sideways writers, are credited with having spruced up the script written a decade ago by Barry Fanaro.

Tough guy laugh

Ving Rhames gets maybe two laughs as a tough-guy firefighter with a big secret. Rob Schneider actually is offensive as the wacky Asian minister in Niagara Falls who performs Chuck and Larry's commitment ceremony.

In the end, Sandler literally stands up in a courtroom to proclaim that homophobia is bad. Chuck & Larry could play on a pedantic cinema double feature with Hairspray which teaches us that racism is bad.