A shabby mess of a film, Little Nicky is a chaotic mish-mash of bad edits, gay jokes, demonic special effects, and shameless plugs for Popeye's Fried Chicken.

Adam Sandler mutes his natural appeal by hissing out of the side of his face to play the title character, the favored son of the Devil (Harvey Keitel). The Devil's 10,000-year reign over hell is about to end, and one of his 3 sons is likely to succeed him. But he doesn't pick Nicky, because Nicky's too sweet. And he doesn't trust either of his other two sons, the intelligent white Adrian (Rhys Ifans) or the dumb black Cassius (Tiny Lister). Instead, he decides to keep his throne, which pisses off Adrian and Cassius so much they decide to leave hell and create a new hell on Earth.

They escape through the gates and immediately set about corrupting the citizens of New York City. The Gates of Hell freeze when they leave, meaning no new souls can come in, which makes the Devil start disintegrating. If Nicky doesn't follow his errant brothers up to New York and drag them back down to Hell, his father will die, and Adrian or Cassius can rule as the King of Darkness for 10,000 years. That's some no-nonsense plotting.

Watching New York descend into hellish decadence is amusing (only true New Yorkers will likely be able to detect the difference). Little kids start swearing. Regis brags on his morning show about beating the hell out of a guy with a baseball bat. The mayor changes the city motto from "I Love New York" to "I Love Hookers".

Meanwhile Nicky wanders around town with his trusty talking bulldog trying to find his brothers and stop them. Along the way he meets Valerie (Patricia Arquette, looking cute and geeky in Ugly Duckling mode) and for the first time experiences the butterflies of human love. He also discovers his demonic powers, which he exercises by turning Coke into Pepsi.

Some of this is amusing, but it's all too silly and antic to be laugh-out-loud funny. A good example of the close-but-not-there nature of the picture is its vision of heaven. It gets things almost right, by showing heaven populated by hot sexy angels with sleek wings and lacey white cocktail dresses. But a really sexy angel would sound like a phone sex girl before, a shrieking alley cat during, and Marie Curie after (I mean, after a good night's sleep, that is). But these angels (as led by Reese Witherspoon) are Valley-girl talking, cell phone yabbering bimbos. Hello?? Chattering teenage airheads may be Adam Sandler's idea of heaven, but it sure doesn't do it for me.

Little Nicky ain't hell, but it falls way short in the heavenly department.