Screenhead

There are phrases you never want to hear people say.  You’ll hear several of them in Big Stan.

Despite a really, REALLY unpleasant beginning in which Rob Schneider talks an elderly woman into buying a time share by alluding to the neighborhood in which she’ll be surprisingly popular, Big Stan, one of Schneider’s newest titles and one of David Carradine’s last, is going to bring a whole lot of laughs.  This is despite the fact that it’s one of the crassest titles released in some time.

Big Stan is all about Stan Minton, a shady real estate shyster who finds himself doing a three to five year stretch in prison for fraud.  With six months to go before his sentence begins, Minton turns to a man, The Master, to teach him how to be a kung-fu badass.  Thankfully, The Master is played by David Carradine, so you know that Stan’s going to be taught right.  When Stan finally reaches prison six months later, he becomes an agent of change…until the warden decides that Stan’s OLD talents are much more valuable to him.  Will Stan take the easy way out?  Or will he serve his time in peace?

I hadn’t expected so many laughs to come out of this one.  I really hadn’t.  In fact, I was expecting yet another godawful Deuce Bigalow or something else to come boiling out of this mess.  The fact that it had gone, pretty much, direct to video was scarcely encouraging.

But if you didn’t know about it before, you do now–direct to DVD is not the trash heap it once was.  In fact, it’s becoming rapidly the wave of the future.  Cheaper, faster, easier–and we get solid product in rapid order.  Big Stan is an excellent example of how the industry is moving.  Fairly big names (let’s be honest here, most people recognize the name “Rob Schneider” when they hear it) making solid if low-budget titles.

Okay, sure–no one’s ever going to mistake Big Stan for Oscar material.  There are metric tons of rape jokes in here, and other, much less savory topics.  But there’s also plenty of action and lots of choice top-rank comedy.  There’s lots to love about this truly surprising charmer.  And I mean surprising–I was caught completely off-guard on this one.  I never expected I would laugh like this at a Rob Schneider film, and yet, laugh I did.

Most of us who remember Rob Schneider’s early career, back before the full-page ads and the relentless screaming at critics and other assorted garbage that he willfully cluttered his career with, remember him as a stand-up funnyman, the kind who could deliver laughs regularly and with great force.  Of course, that all started to fall apart about midway through, but perhaps the whole direct-to-video thing will be good for Rob’s career.  Maybe it’ll let him get that old funny back, and give us all reason to keep watching.

Maybe…but I’m not holding my breath.

The key take-away here, however, is that Big Stan is going to prove to be an excellent experience, with plenty of laughs, and once you get past the outer shell of crass humor, you’ll find all those laughs and be glad for every one.  Big Stan takes home a seven out of ten on the Screenhead Ten Scale for doing what it set out to do, if not necessarily in the best way.

Popularity: unranked [?]