GROWN UPS
RYAN: We’ve got a new comedy this weekend from actor/producer Adam Sandler called Grown Ups.
CAROLINE: He also co-wrote the movie, which I find hard to believe since it pretty much a shapeless, scriptless mess.
RYAN: I’m sorry but Adam Sandler is so past his prime in movies. I’m over him. His humor is just not up my alley at all. But I didn’t hate this movie as much as I thought I would, and it wasn’t as offensive as his last few movies.
CAROLINE: I hated it even more than I thought I would. I knew from the trailer not to except much, but I seriously only laughed twice. I expected kid-friendly humor since it’s PG-13, but the jokes are beyond juvenile. We’re talking pee pee and fart jokes, breastfeeding jokes, bad sex jokes and jokes about old people. They even ruin the Tooth Fairy for God’s sake.
RYAN: I’m just happy that it’s the first Adam Sandler movie in years that didn’t have homophobic humor.
CAROLINE: This movie is painful to watch. As we all know by now, the co-stars are Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider, and each one is less funny than the next. None of them can act very well.
RYAN: It’s a very cheesy movie, and they were way too precious with the editing and directing. You could tell they thought they were showing these great moments of male bonding, and then they tried to throw in a punch line and it didn’t work. Maybe you have to be an unattractive 40-something father to get it.
CAROLINE: All of the humor felt really forced. The jokes had overly long set ups and then the unfunny punch line came and then they’d quickly cut to the next moment. There was no pay off, and no time to breathe between scenes. The pacing was just all wrong. I kept thinking, How could they think these jokes are funny? because these are some really good comedians.
RYAN: I liked the women in the movie. Maria Bello was good as a tanorexic bleach blond housewife.
CAROLINE: I think my favorite was Maya Rudolph because she’s hilarious in everything she does. And Salma Hayek looks gorgeous as always.
RYAN: She’s beyond! But it’s really just a lame, unfunny dude comedy.
CAROLINE: They had to keep the jokes clean because of the rating, but these guys are much funnier when they’re being raunchy. David Spade was the most offensive to me though; he looks like a chunky middle aged woman. Why does he insist on having that hair? And his character seems to be modeled on his real life – unmarried, still partying and looking to get laid. It just made me sad more than anything else.
RYAN: He does look really unfortunate in this movie. I think Kevin James was the funniest one. Chris Rock barely has anything to do.
CAROLINE: Which is a good thing because he’s probably the worst actor of the bunch. Even Adam Sandler wasn’t great. He looked like he was about to laugh in every scene. And they were trying to cover so many story lines and depict each of the five guys’ lives equally that it just felt like a jumbled mess.
RYAN: The kids in it are all pretty cute, and I did appreciate the moral of it and the sweetness to it. It’s more of a family film than anything else, even though it’s about adults. It’s trying to straddle both worlds but ends up being kind of blah.
— BOTTOM LINE —
CAROLINE: I’m amazed at how bad the jokes were in this movie full of normally funny people. I found it extraordinarily painful to watch, unfunny, poorly acted, poorly written and poorly edited.
RYAN: It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, but I was mostly just bored. It’s definitely not worth seeing in the theater, and I probably wouldn’t even get through the whole thing if I saw it on cable. And the product placement was so in your face that it drove me nuts.
CAROLINE: Maybe kids will laugh at it, but to me it was just a big ole waste of time.
— RATING —
