Based on Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s Off-Broadway show Fucking Identical Twins, Dicks: The Musical plays to the cheap seats from the get-go. This perverse riff on The Parent Trap—in which identical twins separated at birth, Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson), meet and try to reunite their gay father, Harris (Nathan Lane), with their agoraphobic, wheelchair-bound mother, Evelyn (Megan Mullally)—delights in breaking the rules of good taste. Yet its ceaseless reveling in the raunchy and depraved, including a queer, coke-snorting God (Bowen Yang) and a detached flying vagina, is all that Dicks has going for it.
Larry Charles’s film opens with something of a mission statement: sarcastic on-screen text declaring that Sharp and Jackson are gay and that their decision to play misogynistic straight dudes is incredibly brave. It’s a clear shot at the overt self-satisfaction of certain actors’ tendencies to inflate their own sense of importance when tackling even the smallest of social issues. But any hopes of intelligent, or even coherent, satirizing of Broadway, Hollywood, or, well, anything at all are quickly dashed when the opening number kicks in and Craig and Trevor jump into a rousing song-and-dance about their love of “stunning big-tit ladies.”
That number is an amusing enough start to a film whose humor pledges allegiance above all else to the random, but the constant need for irreverence leads to diminishing returns. A glaring exception to that rule is Megan Thee Stallion’s show-stopping banger “Out Alpha the Alpha,” which briefly breathes life back into the film at the halfway mark. Mullally and Lane also have a couple of choice scenes together, while the latter’s sincere affection for a pair of bizarre little monsters called the Sewer Boys gets a lot of mileage out of a one-note joke. But like many of the jokes in Dicks, that one is returned to a few too many times.
There’s something impressive, even admirable, about the filmmakers sticking to their guns with regard to the singularly strange world they’ve created here. But this strategy inevitably results in a kind of atrophy: The go-for-broke zaniness that’s initially infectious soon grows tiresome, even grating, even over the course of a relatively brief 86 minutes. Charles’s film is, at best, disjointed, and more often so aimless that there’s nothing to latch onto if the overzealous humor of a particular moment doesn’t catch your fancy. There’s inspired lunacy in fits and starts, but in the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.
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