By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 1 hour ago
Jack Black is now seen as a go-to Hollywood actor. He’s the guy you cast whenever you want to bring an adorkable romantic lead or quirky cartoon character to life. But nearly a quarter of a century ago, he teamed up with Gwyneth Paltrow for one of the most politically incorrect movies of the modern age, and it’s a miracle he hasn’t been retroactively canceled for it.
If you’d like to see just how many laughs can fit inside this plus-sized romantic comedy, you can now stream Shallow Hal (2001) for yourself.
Beer Goggles Without The Booze
The premise of Shallow Hal is that bizarre advice from Hal’s dying, drugged-out father convinced him that he should never settle for a woman who isn’t smoking hot. This leads to a lifetime of getting rejected by perfect 10s, but a hypnosis session from Tony Robbins (yes, the Tony Robbins) fixes the problem by ensuring that he now sees women’s inner beauty rather than their outer appearance.
This leads to Jack Black’s Hal falling in love with the morbidly obese daughter of his boss. Unless his love for women can go more than skin deep, his hypno-powered misadventures in love could end up costing him everything.
No Fat On These Performances
The supporting cast of Shallow Hal has some fun surprises, including Seinfeld icon Jason Alexander as the main character’s best and most neurotic friend. Meanwhile, Bruce McGill (best known for Animal House) plays the title character’s father, a righteous reverend whose painkiller-fueled deathbed advice transforms Hal into someone who always judges books (not to mention women) by their cover.
Tony Robbins’s cameo as himself is really fun. His hypnotic command is what gets Hal to finally notice how beautiful women are on the inside.
Hal is played to perfection by Jack Black (best known for High Fidelity), who manages the incredible feat of making his character shallow without making him into a creep. Gwyneth Paltrow (best known for Shakespeare In Love) is equally perfect as the female lead, and her performance shines despite how much screentime she spends practically disappearing into a fat suit.
With different actors, this movie would have been an instant failure. However, the chemistry shared by Black and Paltrow transforms it into a sweet romantic comedy that happens to have one of the weirdest cinematic premises of the last 25 years.
More Than Just Another Fat Joke
Shallow Hal made a bigger splash at the box office than a fat kid doing a cannonball into the pool, earning $141.4 million against a budget of $40 million. After this box office success, it ended up topping the video rental charts (y’all remember video rentals?) as soon as it hit home video.
Speaking of home video, it was only out on DVD for a month before it was available on pay-per-view. It became the highest-performing PPV title of 2002 (which was kind of a huge deal in the days before streaming).
Critics Are Split On Shallow Hal
When Shallow Hal came out, it was a little too shallow for the critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a rating of 49 percent, with critics generally complaining that it didn’t feature enough laughs to go with its (ahem) weighty premise. They did praise the movie, however, for being warmer and sweeter than other films from the Farrelly brothers, including Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary.
I watched Shallow Hal when it first came out, and I dreaded that it was going to be nothing but one lazy fat joke after another. While the movie does go for the occasional low-hanging fruit of fat suit punchlines and gross-out body gags, most of its runtime serves as a surprisingly saccharine examination of love, lust, and every raw emotion in between.
There are surprisingly moving messages hidden in this film’s emotional climax. The vulnerability behind it has helped Shallow Hal age remarkably well.
Politically Incorrect And Weirdly Emotional
Shallow Hal is the rare romantic comedy that you can enjoy both for its schmaltzy celebration of love and its raunchy celebration of humor. This combination of salty and sweet was enough to win over Roger Ebert, who gave the film 3 out of 4 stars while praising it as “very funny, but… also surprisingly moving at times.” Whether you’re in the mood for a killer comedy, a sweeping romance, or a bit of both, this quirky classic has you covered.
Will you agree that Shallow Hal is worth its weight in laughs, or will you end up shedding some digital pounds by taking it off your streaming queue? The only way to find out is to burn a few calories by reaching for the remote and streaming this vintage comedy classic for yourself on rental streaming. Just make sure you’re sitting down, because this film’s punchlines are just as plus-sized as Gwyneth Paltrow’s character.
