D

A match made not in heaven, but in the sort of studio script conference that turns every idea into mass-market mush. What Francis Veber did brilliantly on a small scale in “The Closet,” Hollywood now attempts on a much larger one in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” once again proving that size isn’t everything. Veber’s movie, of course, was about a fellow who implied, falsely, that he was gay in order to protect his job by making any decision to axe him reek of discrimination. “Chuck” has a more complicated premise: Larry (Kevin James, a beefy, likable Jackie Gleason type, and a real mugger) is a widowed fireman still pining over his wife’s death, who learns that the way his benefits are set up, if anything happens to him, his kids might be the losers.

So he persuades his womanizing buddy Chuck (Adam Sandler, doing his usual strident shtick) to pretend, along with him, to be gay, so that they can become a legal couple and Larry can arrange for everything to go to his new “domestic partner” and, through him, to his children in the event of a calamity. This leads to an investigation of potential fraud by ferret-like government inspector Clint Fitzer (Steve Buscemi) and to the guys’ hiring pretty lawyer Alex McDonough (Jessica Biel), to whom Chuck is inevitably attracted, to defend them. It also rouses predictable uneasiness on the part of their homophobic colleagues back at the firehouse and the “coming out” of several acquaintances as the result of Chuck and Larry’s supposed courage.

One presumes that the movie’s heart is in the right place—it wants to teach us all to be ourselves, to be tolerant, to recognize that everybody’s worthy of respect, and all that—but like most Hollywood message comedies it’s so ham-fisted that it will cause cringes rather than smiles. Despite—or maybe because of—its desire not to offend, it becomes a deeply offensive movie.

The picture starts out on the wrong foot by asking us to accept Sandler as a chick-magnet stud who’s Mr. February on the department’s fund-raising calendar. Sandler can be a funny guy, but even his most ardent fans would have to doubt that his abrasive personality and snide manner would attract the bevy of super-model types depicted as irresistibly attracted to Chuck and succumb to his every wish. But setting that aside, the lynchpin of the plot concocted by the unlikely combination of sitcom scribe Barry Fanaro and the more sophisticated Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (“About Schmidt,” “Sideways”)—the bluff Larry’s plea to Chuck to go along with the domestic partner business—never seems more than a clumsy plot device.

And it leads immediately to an army of stereotypes. There’s Larry’s son, an effeminate tyke who loves Broadway show tunes. And the family’s gross housekeeper—predictably ugly, rude and randy. And Alex’s flamingly flamboyant brother. And the mailman and colleague who leave the closet as the result of our heroes’ example. And Dan Aykroyd’s put-upon, hard-talking captain. And the fireman who’s straight but wants the guys to think him attractive.

But all these caricatures—including the gay ones—are, sad as they are, relatively benign compared to Buscemi’s fussily repulsive bureaucrat (a terrible waste of this fine actor) and especially Rob Schneider’s oriental wedding chapel proprietor, easily as offensive as Eddie Murphy’s high-latex turn in “Norbit.”

And the comic bits are mostly coarse, especially as directed with Dennis Dugan’s customary lack of subtlety. The worst is certainly an extended soap-in-the-shower sequence that even uses slow motion to emphasize its bad idea. But the stuff involving Chuck’s womanizing early on is dreadfully crass, the guys’ rescue of a flatulent fellow in a fat suit is appalling, and the cameos by SNL regulars David Spade and Rachel Dratch are really overripe.

But “Chuck and Larry” is even worse when it gets instructive or sweet. A confrontation between a group of gay partygoers and rabidly hateful protestors is awful, as is another involving Larry and the bigoted father of student at his son’s school. So too is the heavy-handed moment when Larry castigates his fellow firemen for circulating a petition demanding that he and Chuck be transferred. And the bonding scenes between Chuck and Larry’s daughter are mawkish.

The worst is kept for last, though, as the makers, despite their supposed progressiveness, contrive a misguided courtroom scene that reveals just how squeamish they actually are in presenting their message to a mainstream audience. One can understand the difficulty the writers faced in inventing a satisfactory wrap-up for their contorted plot, but the one they’ve devised is so lame that one has to wonder why Richard Chamberlain, of all people, agreed to appear in it. Particularly weak-kneed is an extended moment in which Larry and Chuck are about to kiss, designed—it appears—to play on the discomfort many in the audience will feel at the thought of the kiss actually happening. And then the picture simply chickens out, just as “Ghost” did years ago when it abruptly switched the scene of Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg about to smooch to one of Moore and Patrick Swayze, who’s supposedly inhabiting Goldberg’s body, finally doing so. The passage of nearly twenty years, it seems, hasn’t changed the Hollywood calculus much in such matters: a cop-out is still a cop-out.

From a technical perspective “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” is mediocre, with a garish look provided by production designer Perry Andelin Blake and the art directing team led by Alan Au that’s accentuated by the over-bright cinematography of Dean Semler. The result is that the picture is as tiresome to look at as it is to listen to.

“Chuck and Larry” may be well-meaning, but it’s a dud, and a spineless one at that. One wishes the makers had taken to heart a bit of dialogue put in Alex’s mouth early on: “Gays and lesbians haven’t been fighting for their rights for forty years to be made a mockery of.” Unfortunately, their picture suggests exactly the opposite.