Friday, July 26, 2013

Grown Ups 2 - Zero stars

I have a long and complicated relationship with Adam Sandler.  I enjoyed him on SNL and I bought his comedy albums.  The first one came out when I was still in high school.  It was crazy and funny and dirty and I listened to it over and over.

Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore were enjoyable.  But then around the time of Big Daddy he started trying to have a message in his movies.  They would be funny, but then they became like an after school special at the end.  I just like my Adam Sandler movies to make me laugh.  Don't try and give me a life lesson.

Every year there is a new Sandler movie, and some make me laugh more than others.  The last couple, That's My Boy and Jack and Jill, were technically pretty bad movies but I laughed.  I don't care how dumb a movie is if I'm laughing.

I did not laugh while watching Grown Ups 2.  It's the most lazy thing he has ever released.  It's like he and his friends had a pitch meeting, wrote down every idea they came up with, then started shooting the next day.  They skipped the part where you work on the ideas, keeping some and dropping others, and form them into a story and then a script.  It's like they just had a rough outline of things to film and the movie was improvised.

The movie opens with Sandler and his wife waking up to find a deer in their room.  Why is a deer inside their house?  Because they moved from LA back to the town he grew up in.  Even though the town isn't a mountain town, everything between New York and LA is just wilderness, right?  So yeah, for no reason a deer is inside the house.  And it pees on Sandler.

David Spade has a son he never knew about.  The kid comes to stay with him, unsupervised, even though they've never met and Spade has no desire to get to know the kid.  Kevin James sneaks over to his mom's house to hang out with her and watch soap operas, even though his wife has no problem with his mom.  Why?  This is never really explored.  Chris Rock works for the cable company, and he takes pleasure in making an old woman wait for him to arrive, waits for her to go to the bathroom, then knocks and quickly leaves.  He leaves a "sorry we missed you" sign on her door.  Why?  This is never explained.

Sandler's kids have their own sub plots that are never explored much.  One son turns out to be a great football kicker, but he breaks his leg an that's over before it began.  His older son has a crush on a girl and is afraid to ask her out.  He finally does, she says yes, and that's that.  We don't get to see the date or what happens.  Well, they do meet up at the party at the end of the movie, but we get maybe 10 seconds of them together.

Sandler also has an elementary school crush who is stalking him or something.  This goes nowhere.

The more I think about this movie, the more annoyed I get.  It's like Sandler and his friends are deliberately making their movies worse because they know people will pay to go see them and they'll make a bunch of money.  Is it too much to ask for a story and a script with a few jokes?  Avoid this movie at all costs.

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