D-

The question of which Rob Schneider movie most cried out for a remake is a query that would stump the most advanced computer, but certainly “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” would be near the bottom of the list. It should therefore come as absolutely no surprise that “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” is about as wretched as they come. It’s a movie that exceeds your lowest expectations–it’s not only coarse and raunchy but utterly unfunny.

The awful script, by Schneider, David Garrett and Jason Ward, has Bigalow going to Amsterdam at the invitation of pimp T.J. Hicks (Eddie Griffin). There he gets involved in trying to track down a serial killer of male prostitutes in order to clear T.J., who’s suspected of the crimes by a belligerent police official (Jeroen Krabbe). The task requires him to battle with the smugly superior attitudes of the European Union of Male Whores, whose members dismiss him as an insult to their profession, as well as to have dates with all the women who’d hired the dead guys. He also gets romantically involved with the policeman’s sweet niece Eva (Hanna Verboom).

This flimsy scenario obviously invites a virtual avalanche of crude, smarmy dialogue and situations, which Schneider tries to pull off with a mixture of wide-eyed niceness and naive befuddlement. But even he can’t make sequences such as one in which a huge, Amazonian client forces him to dress up in a diaper and act like a baby anything less than revolting. And the run of sexual sliminess is aggravated by lots of humor involving physical or mental disability (among the objects of mirth are blind people and women with about every form of gross physical abnormality one can think of, from a hump on the back to big ears to a penis where her nose should be!), along with a steady stream of potty humor (the low point being a sequence involving Griffin, a toilet and a cat), drug jokes, throwaways involving Dutch permissiveness and gay-themed gags (in which poor Griffin, again, is most implicated). As if all that weren’t bad enough, things are periodically interrupted by sophomoric jibes involving European disdain for Americans and U.S. policy. The sum of all this is an assault on taste that might be enjoyable if it elicited any laughs. But in this case the tastelessness is just that and no more.

Schneider ambles through the morass looking grubby and managing to retain a bit of seedy charm, but Griffin sinks beneath the weight of the accumulated rubbish he’s required to deal with. As for Krabbe, the distinguished actor looks understandably desperate from his first scene, and Verboom–a particularly apt surname for somebody in a picture like this–is a pretty young thing compelled to struggle with demeaning material involving her character’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mike Bigelow’s direction is lackadaisical, and the physical production chintzy.

Rob Schneider can actually be a pretty funny guy. It’s a pity that his most engaging moments on the big screen continue to be when he shouts “You can do it!” in the big finishes of Adam Sandler movies (whose Happy Madison production company financed “Deuce 2”). But that’s the sorry truth of his career. “The Wedding Crashers” has demonstrated that audiences will still turn out for R-rated comedies. One hopes that this miserable example will prove that they can still shun them, too.