REVIEW: The Week Of

I will admit that in my teenage years I enjoyed and laughed at some Adam Sandler movies.  I saw The Water Boy and Mr. Deeds in theatre.  They were good enough times for thoughtless laughs, but the problem was that I grew up and matured, the films from Adam Sandler remained the same.  There was no evolution to the Adam Sandler movie, no growth and development.  It was always just the exact same thing, over and over.

There are certain things that you can be sure you will come across in a Sandler film.  Him yelling for an extended period of time happens a lot.  That's where the comedy is.  There will also be children doing shocking things.  Add in some interesting views of foreigners and taking some entertainment around people who look different.  A lot of times it can be mean-spirited humour, and will always involve some sort of toilet joke.

After having a string of horrible Sandler experiences from his deal with Netflix, I was completely blown away with his latest film, The Week Of.  Now, when I say that I was blown away, I don't mean that the movie was good.  I mean the movie didn't seem as nasty as other attempts, although the common trappings of a Sandler film were still there, just framed a little differently.  Know for sure that this movie is still immature and crude, and, unfortunately, lacking jokes.

The movie is about Kenny Lustig (Sandler) who is about to see his daughter married.  Because of his humble existence, Lustig feels threatened by the father of the groom, Kirby Cordice (Chris Rock), and tries to manage the wedding on his own with his limited finances.  As the film develops there is supposedly some sort of arc to the two fathers that we suddenly learn about in one scene near the end of the film.  With the tension wrapped up, for some reason there is still twenty minutes left.  This felt like a bad decision by director Robert Smigel as it was a bloated portion of the film and didn't add anything.  By the time the credits rolled, I was understanding that this was supposed to have some sort of maturity because of character development, but adding two scenes at the end of a meandering movie doesn't make it story telling.

While this flick had many problems, I didn't feel as though I was completely insulted or offended by it.  I was disappointed when I saw that there was a character that didn't have any legs, and I was preparing for that person to be made fun of.  Instead, oddly enough, it lead to what may have been the only joke in the film that had a set up.  There were other elements of Sandler films in there, such as a kid giving the finger, a cartoony portrayal of a foreigner, and a joke that was simply someone having to poop.  This was, by no means, a movie where I was laughing along with it.

It says a lot when I am blown off my feet that a movie didn't insult the viewer and offend.  That's not the bar that they should be shooting for.  Time has come and gone, but Sandler remains very much the same.  His Happy Madison productions are scripts that feel tossed together with massive amounts of product placement and endless, meaningless cameos.  It is so damned frustrating.  Adam Sandler is so extremely talented.  He has shown it, but only every now and then.  Seeing him in films like The Meyerowitz Stories is a testament to what he is capable of.  Sadly, he seems content throwing out movies that are more rambling sessions than stories, looking towards bodily evacuations to get a laugh.  It is hard seeing these flaccid efforts when I believe, and I truly do believe this, that with some effort and discipline he could land a performance that gets an Oscar nom.  Yes, I do think he has it in him, which makes sitting through these films all the more difficult.

Rating - 1.5 out of 4 stars