Little Nicky

2000

Directed by Steven Brill

Welcome back to Movie Monday, where we continue our journey through my personal list of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Today we’re diving into number 72 on the list: Little Nicky, a 2000 dark fantasy comedy that proves even Satan himself can’t save a bad script.

Let’s set the scene: It’s the year 2000, and Adam Sandler is at the height of his comedic powers. He’s coming off hits like The Waterboy and Big Daddy, and seemingly can do no wrong. So naturally, he decides to make a movie where he plays the sweet-but-simple son of Satan with a speech impediment and a permanently twisted face. Because… why not?

The plot, if we can call it that, follows Nicky (Sandler), the kind-hearted offspring of Satan (Harvey Keitel) and an angel (Reese Witherspoon). When Nicky’s brothers Adrian (Rhys Ifans) and Cassius (Tiny Lister Jr.) escape to Earth to create their own Hell and freeze the gateway to the original underworld, our protagonist must venture to the surface world to stop them. Along the way, he falls in love with a design student named Valerie (Patricia Arquette), makes friends with a talking bulldog, and learns valuable lessons about… something.

If this sounds absolutely bonkers, that’s because it is. Little Nicky feels like what would happen if someone described The Divine Comedy to Adam Sandler after he’d eaten a whole plate of pot brownies. The film throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, and unfortunately, most of it slides right off into a puddle of missed opportunities.

Let’s talk about the cast for a moment. This movie somehow managed to assemble an impressive roster of talent, including Harvey Keitel as Satan (talk about perfect casting), Patricia Arquette, Reese Witherspoon, and even Rodney Dangerfield as Lucifer himself. The film also features more cameos than a Marvel movie, including Jon Lovitz as a pervert who gets chased by giant horny birds in Hell, Ozzy Osbourne as himself (naturally appearing to bite the head off a bat), and Henry Winkler getting covered in bees. Twice. Because once apparently wasn’t funny enough.

The problems with Little Nicky aren’t in its casting – they’re in its execution. The film seems unable to decide whether it wants to be a sweet story about family and love, or a gross-out comedy where Hitler gets a pineapple shoved up his rear end every day. It tries to be both, and ends up being neither. It’s like watching two different movies fighting for dominance, and both of them are losing.

Speaking of Hell, let’s talk about the special effects. For a movie with an $80-85 million budget (in 2000 dollars, no less), the effects often look like they were created on someone’s home computer using Windows 95. The demons look like rejected designs from a Halloween store, and the supposedly hellish landscapes appear more like a low-budget metal band’s music video set.

But perhaps the most painful aspect of the film is Sandler’s performance as Nicky. His character speaks in a twisted, slurred voice that makes him sound like he’s trying to talk while getting dental work done. While this is explained in the plot (his brother hit him in the face with a shovel), it doesn’t make it any less grating to listen to for 90 minutes. It’s like someone took Bobby Boucher from The Waterboy, made him even less intelligible, and then asked him to save the world.

The film’s attempts at humor range from the juvenile (the aforementioned Hitler-pineapple situation) to the bizarre (Satan dating both the Blair Witch and Cher after breaking up with Nicky’s angel mother). Some jokes land with all the grace of a demon falling face-first into a puddle of holy water. Others are so strange they almost work, like the running gag with Kevin Nealon’s character having breasts on his head as punishment from Satan.

From a financial perspective, Little Nicky was a spectacular failure, earning only $58.3 million against its hefty budget. To put that in perspective, the film includes a scene where Dan Marino tries to sell his soul to Satan for a Super Bowl ring, and Satan refuses because he considers himself “too good” to take Marino’s soul. Ironically, the movie itself couldn’t score with audiences either.

The critics were equally unimpressed. The film holds a cringe-worthy 21% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics particularly noting the tasteless jokes and Sandler’s grating performance. Even Roger Ebert, who gave the film two-and-a-half stars and called it “the best Sandler movie to date” (a statement that feels like it might have been written in Hell itself), had to acknowledge Sandler’s lack of finesse.

Yet, there’s something almost admirable about Little Nicky‘s commitment to its own insanity. In an era where many comedies played it safe, this film threw caution to the wind and went all-in on its bizarre premise. It’s like watching a train wreck, but the train is carrying a cargo of demonic creatures, religious imagery, and early-2000s nu-metal (yes, the soundtrack is exactly what you’d expect from a movie made in 2000).

Speaking of music, the soundtrack is a time capsule of peak nu-metal, featuring artists like P.O.D., Deftones, Incubus, and Powerman 5000. It’s exactly what you’d expect Satan’s son to listen to while trying to save Earth from his evil brothers, I suppose. Though I have to wonder if forcing demons to listen to this soundtrack might be considered cruel and unusual punishment even by Hell’s standards.

By the end of the film, when Nicky has saved both Earth and Hell, found love, and somehow spawned a child with demonic powers who turns milk into moose urine (yes, really), you’re left wondering what exactly you just watched. It’s like a fever dream written by a committee of 13-year-old boys who just discovered both heavy metal and religious symbolism.

Little Nicky isn’t the worst movie ever made – it’s not even the worst movie on my list, coming in at number 72. But it’s a perfect example of what happens when ambition outpaces execution, when a decent budget can’t save a troubled script, and when even talented actors can’t elevate material that seems designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

In the end, Little Nicky feels less like a movie and more like a dare that got out of hand. It’s as if someone bet Adam Sandler he couldn’t make a movie about Satan’s nice son, and he replied, “Hold my pineapple.” The result is a film that’s not quite bad enough to be good, not quite good enough to be bad, and exactly weird enough to make you question whether you actually saw it or just had a very strange dream after eating too much spicy food.

At least Hitler got his comeuppance. Repeatedly. With a pineapple. If that’s not cinema, I don’t know what is.