Little Nicky
Hell of a Ride
I’ll admit to you, right now, that I went to go see Little Nicky with every intention of knifing it. I walked into the theater with the express mission of writing a scathing, searing, truthful review of what I fully expected would be a truly horrible movie. “Be honest, and be ruthless,” rock journalist Phillip Seymour Hoffman tells his young critic protege in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, and I was prepared to be both.
The problem with Little Nicky is, if I’m honest, then I can’t be ruthless.
Little Nicky is the kind of movie that critics attack the way that a leopard attacks a wounded antelope. Its deficiencies are manifold and obvious. It is, to begin with, a Saturday Night Live movie, which have been, since Wayne’s World, a byword for badness in film. It stars Adam Sandler, who consistently belies his great comic talents in favor of potty jokes. The characters are all broadly drawn caricatures; the plot is a thin tissue of contrivances. And the trailers give away lots of the funny bits.
None of this augurs well for the movie, and yet Little Nicky still manages to pull off some slick comic surprises. For example; there’s a scene early in the movie where Satan (Harvey Keitel, who is more relaxed than usual) announces his plans to stay on as Lord of Hell for another ten thousand years. His three sons leave the throne room; Sandler (who a cruel pediatrician might label an FLK: Funny Looking Kid) is relieved; Tiny Lister is aggravated; Rhys Ifans is conniving. But the business of running Hell isn’t over; the Devil has an immediate audience with Dan Marino, of all people. Keitel refuses to give Marino another shot at a Super Bowl ring. “But you gave one to Namath,” Marino pleads.
“Yeah, but Joe was coming here anyway.”
Little Nicky works as a (marginally) funny movie because there are enough of these kinds of gags to counterbalance the omnipresent stupid potty jokes. If Little Nicky were a completely unintelligent movie — and Lord knows, Sandler’s made enough of those — it would be absolutely unbearable. But there’s enough smart comedy here to make things enjoyable — like the decision of Satan’s smarter sons to leave hell and set up shop in New York. “Grandfather left heaven because he decided it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven,” Ifans explains. “Maybe it’s better to rule on Earth than to serve in hell.” See, there you go; how can a movie that quotes Milton be all bad?
Nicky is dispatched to New York to return his brothers to Hell (there’s a lot of celestial mechanics involved that you can safely ignore) and has to cope with a world he doesn’t quite get and “Mr. Beefy”, a small talking bulldog, for a guide. (Mr. Beefy turns in the best acting performance in the movie; probably thanks to some CGI help, I expect.) They clatter aimlessly around New York — with Sandler dressed in a series of polyester parkas, it being colder in New York than it is in Hell — interacting with a random set of New Yorkers. In the meantime, his brothers (Ifans mostly; Lister is swiftly dispatched) raise all kinds of mayhem and ruckus, lowering the drinking age to ten, and legalizing prostitution. (”I love hookers” becomes the new city motto.)
Some of this is funny; the celebrity cameos are pretty good, with Regis Philbin going on a spree of venegance, Reese Witherspoon as a Material Girl angel, Rodney Dangerfield as the ex-boss of Hell, and Henry Winkler as himself. (How did Henry Winkler turn into Fred McMurray all of a sudden?) Much of it will only be funny to die-hard Sandler fans and anyone who has an emotional age of twelve or under. But there are a couple of the unfunny gags — the Popeye’s Fried Chicken product placement; Kevin Nealon’s hapless Gatekeeper of Hell, the ways that Sandler finds to return to hell, Ifans’s preference for peppermint schnapps — that have payoffs down the line. An example of this is Nicky’s lame joke that he’s not a New Yorker; he’s from the South. “The Deep South, huh-huh-huh.” Later on, he flies up to his girlfriend’s (Patricia Arquette) window and reveals himself to be the Spawn of Satan.
“Oh,” she says. “Now I get that Deep South joke.” And the two fly away across New York, in homage to Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in Superman.
Little Nicky ends (after a series of clever little plot twists) where it should end, with a climactic battle in Central Park between Nicky and his brother, between good (after Nicky learns to release the good side of his angelic heritage) and evil. And it was at this point that it struck me; the ubiquitous Popeye’s ads had a purpose. Little Nicky is really just a Popeye The Sailor Man cartoon writ large; Sandler’s even got a speech impediment like Popeye does. And like Popeye, Sandler is a nice guy who has to trigger his inner strength to battle evil. (How did Patricia Arquette turn into Olive Oyl all of a sudden?) And he does win, and we’re happy, and the movie ends.
I wish I could have found it in myself to give Little Nicky the critical beating it deserves; but I just couldn’t. (The fact that I snuck into the movie without paying probably has something to do with it.) Much of it is unfunny, tasteless drivel, but it has just enough surprisingly funny material to offset the movie’s weaknesses. One can only hope that Sandler’s better angels will one day vanquish his creative demons so he can come up with a truly great comedy.