Adam Sandler’s movies have become increasingly less palatable over time, especially most recently, for a couple reasons. The most obvious reason is that they just keep getting worse and worse as the comedian grows older and more out of touch. But the second reason is that ever since Sandler starred in Judd Apatow’s Funny People (a movie that despite its own flaws is infinitely more ambitious than anything Sandler has ever done), his movies not only look bad, they look lazy and vile. Sandler’s role in Funny People was a self-aware sendup of his own career trajectory. His character there started as a standup, progressed into movies, and over time became a cog in the Hollywood machine of idiocy. In that film we get parody films that Sandler’s stand-in has starred in; one called Merman sees the actor trying to live in the city while hiding the fact that he has a giant fish tail instead of legs, the other is called Re-Do and it features Sandler being turned into an infant who still has his adult head digitally inserted onto a baby’s body. These parody films are moronic and schlocky, but they’re funny because they’re just the kind of crap that Sandler might actually get involved with. With Funny People it seemed like Sandler was acknowledging the missteps he took with his life’s work and recommitting himself to doing more interesting things in the future. But apparently that wasn’t the case.
Instead, the man has continued to churn out lazy crap. And now he brings us the most egregiously stupid thing he has made to date, Jack and Jill, a movie in which Sandler dons drag and a goofy voice to play not just his typical schlubby everyman character, but also that character’s absurdly masculine twin sister. Just one look at the poster is enough to get anyone’s head shaking. Surely this is a another parody film, right? This couldn’t possibly be a mainstream, wide release film that somebody conceived of, produced, and then distributed, could it? It could. That’s exactly where our culture is.
The thing is, Sandler is ridiculously rich at this point; he doesn’t need to ever work again. And yet he keeps coming out with these miserable movies. He has acknowledged that the films he makes are utter tripe, and yet we can see no visible effort made to improve the products whatsoever. On the contrary, with each film that he makes Sandler seems to visibly be less and less interested in what he’s doing. He doesn’t even play characters anymore. Instead he steps in front of the camera in the same hoodie and shorts ensemble that he probably showed up to set wearing, and he passionlessly delivers lines that he doesn’t even seem to have bothered memorizing entirely.
Sandler’s recent films feel like a slap in the face to the audience. They play like tacky cash grabs from a multi-millionaire who knows that his movies are moronic but doesn’t care. Sandler looks entitled, like he believes he intrinsically deserves our money and is kind of annoyed that he still has to show up on film sets and actually make a product. So he goes through the motions, churns out dreck, and laughs at us mockingly as we lap it up. When I watch Adam Sandler movies the thing that strikes me most is the scorn that I sense, sent from Hollywood straight to Middle America. They think that they can give us absolutely anything, no matter how mindless and juvenile, and we’ll just keep buying tickets anyway. And for some reason we do. Jack and Jill is an icky indictment of a society that has lost its way.
Sandler’s first couple movies, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, were actually funny; and largely it was because he was using his unique comedic talents to play completely out there characters. He wasn’t this slumping, mumbly mouthed regular guy that he’s become over time. He was an insane person with a chaotic gleam in his eye. It’s when Sandler is shouting at the rooftops that he’s at his best, not when he’s casually tossing off witless asides. The good news is, with Jill he’s finally found another character that allows him to break free from the constraints of playing the straight man and instead revel in the stupidity of crafting a completely insane personality. As far as performance goes, the scenes where Sandler is playing Jill are the most energized and engaged I’ve seen the actor in years. As skeptical as I was at the concept of Sandler playing a woman in a very broad, slapstick comedy, there was some actual potential here for this to be the best thing he’s done in quite some time.
The bad news is, the material that Jill delivers doesn’t come close to matching the energy that Sandler brings to the character. The only gags the Jill character has to offer us are funny voices, the one-note visual of a man dressed up like a woman, and fart sounds. Nothing remotely resembling clever comes from Jill’s presence in this movie, nothing even halfway to funny emerges from all of the vamping and yelling Sandler does in the role. All we get is a loud, gross annoyance who is treated by the other characters and the people who made this film with utter disdain. Jill is abrasive, thoughtless, and yet she’s supposed to be the sympathetic character who we relate to and root for come the film’s climax. Give me a break.
And though I’m willing to give Sandler credit for finally appearing to approach one of his characters with something resembling excitement or interest, his performance as the other half of this twin duo, Jack, is the worst case of disengaged Sandler that I’ve ever seen. Jack is dumb, without charm, quick to lash out at everything around him, and generally just a contemptible curmudgeon. His dialogue reads like Sandler just mumbling his way through the gist of the scene without sticking to anything crafted by a writer. You get the impression that the actor was annoyed that he already filmed these scenes once as one character and then had to come back and re-do them as another. That’s like twice the work for the same amount of money!
Jack and Jill is a movie that’s hateful, juvenile, and just plain bad. It’s got miserably stupid characters, half-baked humor, and it feels more like sketch comedy rehearsals than a finished, polished product. Jack has a son in this movie who loves to tape things to himself. One of the reoccurring gags is that he keeps showing up with increasingly random things taped to his body. Why does he do it? What is it supposed to be funny? It’s never explained. This movie just throws random things at the wall and doesn’t even bother to see if they stick or not. This is casual riffing, not a comedy worth your ticket purchase.
I would say that the whole thing was completely irredeemable and worthy of boycott if it weren’t for the Herculian efforts of Al Pacino. He appears playing himself, but a very manic version of himself who is smitten with Jill from the first second he sees her. He spends the rest of the film desperately pursuing her, which works out well for Jack because he needs to cast Pacino in a Dunkin Donuts commercial or lose their account at his ad agency, and it works out well for the screenwriters because it gives them a reason for Jack to keep Jill around despite the fact that she’s so irritating. But who Pacino’s inclusion works out best for is the audience. In a sea of unfunny he stands out like a life raft of chuckles. His plot thread is moronic, the things he is asked to do absurd, but they work because Pacino is the only person who doesn’t come off as embarrassed to be in this film. He throws himself into the role with gusto, not only sending up his persona with ego-free self effacing glee, but also committing himself fully to the reality of being a man wounded by the sting of unrequited love. Pacino being attracted to Sandler in drag is a dumb scenario, but it generates laughs specifically because Pacino plays it all so dramatically. By the end of the film, when we get treated to his catch phrase laden “Dunk-a-cino” rap, I was thanking the lord above that Pacino somehow agreed to do this film. He isn’t able to save the patented, tear jerking sappiness that Sandler once again tries to sell us in the third act; but, because of him, Jack and Jill becomes a comedy that isn’t completely free of laughs and isn’t completely a waste of time. Just mostly.
