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However much you think you love Rachel McAdams, I love her more. I believe she earned her Oscar nomination for Spotlight off one ten-second stretch alone.¹ I believe she’s responsible for the most gut-busting line delivery of the 2010s, which should have earned her another Oscar nomination, frankly. I’ve been locked in since her one-episode run on The Famous Jett Jackson as Riley’s perfect and secretly bulimic older sister.² Which means that, even before her legendary 2004-2005 run (Mean Girls. The Notebook. Red Eye. Wedding Crashers. The Family Stone. Like, come ON), I was there to appreciate her being a diamond in the rough in The Hot Chick.

It’s…very rough.

Jessica, a proto-Regina George (Rachel McAdams), is the most popular girl in school. She has the best bestie (Anna Faris), the best boyfriend (Matthew Lawrence), the best car (a yellow VW Bug; it did not get any cuter for the 2002 girlypops!)—the best of everything. But when she bullies a witchy classmate in front of everyone, the classmate curses her to swap bodies with a small-time criminal (Rob Schneider) and learn a valuable lesson about…hmm. What it’s like to not be beautiful and popular? How to recognize when your best friend is falling in love with you? What does Jessica learn? Doesn’t matter. She’s gotta switch back by a certain arbitrary deadline, or she’ll be trapped in Rob Schneider’s body forever.

Rob Schneider co-wrote The Hot Chick with director Tom Brady, who is so lucky that there’s another Tom Brady out there to take all the heat for being an awful Tom Brady. This Tom Brady also co-wrote another Schneider vehicle, The Animal. He then went on to direct the little-seen and less-enjoyed sports movie parody The Comebacks, and the even-less-enjoyed Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star. A track record like this just serves as further evidence that only one Harvard graduate has ever been funny on purpose.³ That’s a statistical fact.

This is unorthodox, but I’m going to place a lot of the blame at executive producer Adam Sandler’s feet. His movie’s aren’t my cup of tea, but I can’t deny the man’s success. He’s been making blockbuster-sized comedy hits for four decades at this point, and keeps returning to cultural relevance despite not changing all that much. And he seems like a loyal guy; once you’re in his crew, you’re in his crew forever.

Unfortunately, his crew is packed with so many men that only Adam Sandler finds funny. And these guys are central to some of the least funny movies of the past 40 years. For every Steve Buscemi (too good for them, but it’s nice that he keeps showing up), there’s a drooling Cerberus of Rob Schneider, Kevin James, and Nick Swarsdon goggling back at you.⁴ He has enabled a lot of really awful men, and indulged the worst kind of “what? It’s just jokes!” bullying alongside them. I like The Wedding Singer as much as the next dope, but that one movie doesn’t outweigh a career of dumb, bigoted, and lazy shit.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, or maybe here’s a clip of Sandler in The Hot Chick wearing fake locs and a plausibly deniable “tan,” doing one of Rob Schneider’s SNL bits.

Anna Faris is always forgiven. Anna Faris forever innocent. I have personally enjoyed very few of her movies, just because the brand of comedy is not my favourite, but she is so fucking funny to me. The way she delivers both her “can I see it?” lines here is quietly good stuff.

One thing I’ve noticed about body swap movies is that the swap acting rarely matches. One actor is doing an impression of the other actor, which is cool! And the other actor is doing their own thing, which can be cool. This is especially true when the swap happens across a significant age gap⁵, or gender gap⁶, or when one of the actors is Nicolas Cage⁷, who is always doing his own thing. But it’s extra especially true when the swap happens across a significant talent gap. Unfortunately, with Rob Schneider and Rachel McAdams, we’re working with three out of the four. (Adding Nicolas Cage to this scenario would yield unpredictably but highly watchable results, I’m sure.)

I first saw Rob Schneider in The Waterboy when I was 11 years old, and I hated him on sight. Even at that young age, I found him painfully unfunny and untalented. He’s only ever doing a LOT of frantic mugging for very little payoff. He has made me laugh exactly one time in my life, and I wish I could take that laugh back the way Rashad took New New’s necklace back. (Unfortunately, him misreading “hippopotamus” as “hip hop anonymous” was just too funny to me, I’m sorry.) Being stuck with him for the majority of The Hot Chick feels like punishment, especially when we get so little Rachel McAdams by comparison. Not only is Schneider untalented and unfunny, but his whole performance manages to be deeply misogynistic and homophobic. He’s not inspired by any aspect of McAdams’s performance. He’s just doing a limp-wristed teenage girl bit, and the whole joke is “aren’t girls dumb?”

I saw this movie for my friend’s birthday, because Maid in Manhattan was sold out. If it had not been her birthday, I would have just gone to see The Two Towers by myself—Maid in Manhattan was already a tough sell for me. But since it was her birthday, I settled for crossing my arms and going 😤 at every joke I didn’t like, which was just about all of them. Happy birthday! You knew who you invited.

my dear friend⁸ and I once fell over laughing telling each other “it’s me! Jessica!” while we were lost in the wilds of Philly’s Fairmount Park. So that was nice, that it kept our spirits high.

But truly, it is cool to see Rachel McAdams overcome the material and be extremely fucking funny. Post-body swap, she’s doing a very weird and legitimately good impression of pre-swap Rob Schneider. Like, even this early in her career, my girl knew that taking the premise seriously and not taking herself too seriously would yield actual comedy. I really wish we got more of her post-swap. I’m biased, yes; she’s also just really good at this.

[Skip to 2:51 in this video, if it doesn’t skip for you]

I hate that I’ve seen this movie, absolutely. But I’m also glad that I saw early evidence that Rachel McAdams belongs on the big screen. And she didn’t have to wait too long after sharing billing with America’s second-most punchable Catholic convert to prove it in a huge, unmistakeable way (remember: 2004-2005! What a run!). Despite being a widely respected movie star with an Oscar nomination and a steady, diverse body of work, she still feels underrated somehow.

On the next Terrible Tuesday: My beloved tv franchise takes a noxious turn into self-parody.

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