Grown Ups Review

Adam Sandler's movies have almost always had a family element if they weren't a major part of the story (parental responsibility in 1999's Big Daddy, father-son relationship in Billy Madison and Little Nicky). But lately, especially since the birth of his first daughter in 2006, it's begun to drastically shape his film choices. It started with Click in 2006, a story about appreciating family moments, and continued especially in 2008 when he teamed with Disney for Bedtime Stories. The emotional sweetness of family life has been a major force in Sandler's work, but his patented insult and immature humor has not budged over that time. The latest result of that combination of family love and dirty adult humor is Grown Ups. Despite pooling together the talents of long-time Sandler friends and collaborators Rob Schneider, Chris Rock, David Spade and Kevin James, Grown Ups is an aimless comedy that amounts to a string of recurring jokes and improvisational insult humor with a 50-50 success rate. The movie centers around these five old friends, each with some quirky character concept (Rock's a stay-at-home dad, Spade is a single man-whore, James is fat ... ) who come together years later after the junior high basketball coach who led them to a state championship passes away. They spend the weekend together with all their families at a lake house and do various activities, some funny, some not. That about does it for plot, which ends up as the ultimate problem with Grown Ups. Each character has a back story that influences how they behave and such and what they learn by the end of the film, but nothing pushes this movie along except the jokes that Sandler and co-writer Fred Wolf whip up. Grown Ups survives solely on serving up these jokes of all kinds from creative insults ("you look like a midget Elvis") to physical humor (a few fart jokes and a couple kicks to the groin are examples). Their hope is that at least the majority will get laughs, which works well enough for the first hour, even though some of the recurring gags get sucked to death until they're completely dry, such as Maria Bello, who plays James' wife, breast-feeding her four-year-old son. If you enjoy Sandler's humor, the early barrage of jokes delivers enough decent laughs despite how contrived and even predictable his style has become. Interestingly, the family element looks like it could work toward the beginning: Sandler tries to convince his two boys to stop playing video games and texting and behaving like rich snobs, something recent movies seem to forget in their depiction of today's kids.  Family drama and tender husband-wife moments wiggle their way into the story, but to no effective amount of conflict or resolution. All of it remains secondary to Sandler and his buddies clowning around together, even if the film's goal is to clearly balance the two. Unfortunately, it's the gushy family stuff that ends up weighing down the final act. After all, when your movie is just a bunch of jokes and characters interacting with each other in attempt to amuse themselves, there's no obvious trajectory and no ending that makes sense. As many of Sandler's films tend to do, the bottom of the movie drops out with barely a joke and these peripheral cameo characters such as Steve Buscemi are called upon to provide ineffective comic relief. Grown Ups strives to be funny in that Happy Madison productions way, but also heartfelt and real in its depiction of family life. The objective is admirable, but if families hanging out and various members of them being completely wacko were entertaining in reality, we wouldn't need to go to the movies to watch a movie about that and nothing else -- we'd just do it ourselves. Rating: 4/10 Grown Ups Directed by Dennis Dugan Written by Adam Sandler, Fred Wolf Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade Other Player Affinity Reviews Dinah Thought: "You would think a cast of comedians including Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Chris Rock could inspire one hour and 40 minutes of laughs, heck even half that. But Grown Ups proves a bigger cast does not equal better humor. The film was billed as a comedy when in reality it is a sweet natured family outing. There are jokes between the '90s comedians, but most are too contrived and fall flat. The guys often awkwardly sit around on lawn chairs, stand around in the forest, or up on a deck and rag on each other in between scenes of endearment. Worse than that, Sandler, the biggest name in the bunch, plays it straight, rarely cracking a joke. Chris Rock is so underutilized they could have replaced him with a toaster and no one would have noticed. Spade and James have their moments, but those are too few and far between to save this flick. Rating: 3/10 Simon thought: "There is something to be said for a movie that exceeds your expectations, even if that jump is far from wowing. I was expecting something unwatchable in Adam Sandler’s latest, but merely experienced something flat and cold. Amongst the mediocre comedy in Grown Ups, the worst portions are oddly the moments of drama (or attempted drama) and catharsis. They feel both out of place in a low-brow comedy and are not handled effectively by the cast in large. While Grown Ups plodded along, a funny thing (or should I saw a funny someone) happened in the form of Steve Buscemi in a supporting role towards the latter part of the film. Had Buscemi been properly utilized, Grown Ups could very well have worked. Instead, thanks to the talented comedians languishing in a ho-hum concept this is a huge tumble from the great turn Sandler took in Funny People just last year." Rating: 5/10 Player Affinity Composite Rating: 4.0/10