It's crude and sometimes awkward, but there's a gleefully subversive movie lurking inside I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry . By virtue of a tooth-grinding contrivance, two manly Manhattan firefighters, Adam Sandler and Kevin James, must move in together and pretend to be gay; after seeing life from the other side, they learn something about tolerance. Sandler is the obnoxious, aggressively offensive womanizer, while James plays a widowed dad worried about his … mehreffeminate son. Nothing is too surprising about the way this works out, except for the film's unabashedly gay-rights fervor. It's one thing for a sensitive art-house movie to preach to the choir, and quite another for Sandler to speak to his multiplex audience on how uncool it is to use a homophobic slur. Ham-handedly directed and almost proudly sloppy, Chuck & Larry wins points for remaining defiantly rude; a nicer movie wouldn't have been as effective. There's a hilarious supporting performance by Ving Rhames, and Jessica Biel brings her Kim Novak-style glamour to a truly unbelievable character. Rob Schneider and Richard Chamberlain (two names not generally brought together) are amusing in small roles. --Robert Horton weniger