Over the years Adam Sandler’s starring vehicles (at least the ones he produces himself) have become so obtusely bad and predictably similar that I consider them to be the most difficult films to review. How many ways can you say that his random crudity and nonsensical absurdity doesn’t equal funny? How many ways can you say the schmaltzy pap that makes up the heavy-handed sentiment of his third acts always falls flat? How many times can you complain about the witless poking fun at the fat, elderly, and non-white that insultingly gets passed off as being just a laid back guy having fun and making jokes? Why would anybody waste their time writing yet another full review, when Adam Sandler keeps putting out the same movie over and over again? So I won’t. But I will keep going to see his movies, because their persistent badness holds a sort of fascination for me at this point. Just how long can he keep this up?
This time around Sandler’s playing a ne’er do well named Donny Berger (who talks in a formless mishmash of Sandler’s two or three silly voices combined with varying hints of a Massachusetts accent, depending on how lazy Sandler was feeling on set that day), a drunken trash ball who owes $43 thousand in back taxes to the IRS and who fathered a son with his math teacher when he was 13. The twist is that his son, Han Solo Berger (shame on you, Andy Samberg), is an adult now, something of a preppy finance wizard, and is about to get married. Cue Donny crashing the wedding to do whatever he can to squeeze the money out of his estranged son and avoid prison.
This is an Adam Sandler movie, so what sounds like an inevitable disaster actually works out great for his character. Despite the fact that he’s obnoxious and awful, all of the snooty rich people at the wedding inexplicably love him. Despite the fact that his son denies his existence after experiencing a lifetime of abuse, one night of drinking together makes everything forgiven. And despite the fact that he’s old, out of shape, and weird looking, all of the women in the film want to have sex with him. The self-serving, extended-adolescence train just keeps rolling right along for Adam Sandler. But even as an Adam Sandler movie this one kind of failed for me. Despite this being his big foray into R-rated movies, and despite the fact that the film tried to button push by making sleazy jokes about child molestation and incest, it was really only the casual racism that left me legitimately offended. And where were all of the cameos from his deadbeat friends? I only counted a small handful. If I’m going to buy a ticket to see an Adam Sandler movie, I want to hear Rob Schneider yell, “You can do it!” in a vaguely foreign, don’t-know-why-it’s-supposed-to-be-funny accent. To not even give me that ironic pleasure feels like a slap in the face.
