As Bad As You Might Expect, Only Worse: The Benchwarmers Illustrates Why Zero Out Of Ten Is A Legitimate Rating!

The Good: Casting
The Bad: Terrible acting, characters, plot. Moments of message are mortgaged by lame humor and homophobia
The Basics: In a terribly unfunny film, three losers fight for children who are picked on by playing baseball against children who the audience is supposed to laugh at. Insulting and dumb.


Every now and then, I encounter a movie that I watch and I shake my head and say "Wow, I’m glad I start my ratings at zero!" In the past, with movies like Scary Movie 4 (reviewed here!), I go so far as to suggest that films like this are why Al Queda hates the U.S. After all, if your people were starving and you learned that Americans spent $57,000,000 at the box office on a movie where the level of humor was a recurring joke about children farting in the face of other children, it might make you want to blow something up. I'm not saying that should happen, but my reaction to watching The Benchwarmers on DVD was to think, "$57,000,000" could have been spent so much better. I mean, I'm beginning to think American's can't be trusted with their money when they would collectively spend $57 million on this drecht.

Gus is a landscaper who is trying to start a family with his wife and who essentially watches out for the neighborhood he lives and works in. So, when he sees people bullying a young boy, he steps in. Later, he encounters the same bullies while he and his friends are playing on the local baseball diamond. When Gus, Richie and Clark squarely beat a Little League team of children, billionaire Mel becomes intrigued by them and sends them to play against other kids' teams in the area, offering a baseball stadium to the children who can beat the trio of losers.

The Benchwarmers is billed as crude, adolescent humor with the potentially redeeming factor being its positive message. The three protagonists, as well as a bevy of supplemental characters, are billed as losers, adults who were picked on mercilessly as children, who are out fighting for the underdog. Any attempt at making this argument fails for two reasons. The first is that almost all of the kids that The Benchwarmers are fighting on behalf of are portrayed with obvious defects. So, for example, one kid spits constantly when he talks. In addition to not being funny - watching him spit in other characters' faces, then be imitated by Rob Schneider - it undermines the message of the movie by asking the audience to do act contrary to the message of the film. In short, the philosophy the movie espouses is that no child deserves to be laughed at and mocked, is contradicted by the expectation that we laugh at these kids. Fortunately, the movie is not funny enough to succeed.

Whatever positive message The Benchwarmers has in its anti-bullying message is further mortgaged by the rampant homophobia and sexism in the film. Unlike Shark's Tale (reviewed here!), which was rampant in its racist implications, The Benchwarmers does not bother to hide its disdain for women and homosexuals. Women here are tools, with Gus's wife Liz being portrayed as a nag and Gus having to deal with the inconvenience of her needs. In fact, the viewer has to wonder why Liz wants anything to do with Gus when he prioritizes hanging out with his nosepicking friend more than staying home and making love with her. And from the moment Swimmer Boy comes into the movie as a cheap gay joke, the movie turns beyond a stupid farce into something perpetrating antigay dogma and continued bigotry.

Beyond that, The Benchwarmers is not funny. It's hard to see how this movie would even succeed in entertaining those in the 13 -18 year old age range, which seems to be the audience it is intended for. Unlike Adam Sandler's dramatic renaissance where he has overcome the comedic limitations placed on him through consistently bad writing, Rob Schneider seems content to wallow in them. His character, Gus, is utterly unredeemable in the way he is created on the page and portrayed on screen by Schneider.

Even worse, though, is Jon Heder, who plays Clark. Typecast now as an uber-nerd, no doubt from the cult success of Napoleon Dynamite (reviewed here!), Heder plays Clark with nothing new or different, nothing that is distinctive or fun to watch. No, watching Heder play a character whose sole defining attribute is picking his nose on screen and eating his boogers is just bad.

Similarly, David Spade plays Richie with little distinction or definition. Richie could be any terrible schtick from Spade's days on Saturday Night Live. Here he gives a particularly listless performance, as if he knows his character is saying and doing nothing funny for the entire eighty minutes of this garbage.

Who will like this? Not anyone who likes intelligent movies. Not people who like baseball (there's far too little of that to justify Major League Baseball's promotions of this movie), not people who want a good underdog story, and not those who fight for equal right for all people. Certainly not anyone looking for a laugh. This will not provide that.

For other works with Rob Schneider, check out my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
You Don’t Mess With The Zohan
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry
50 First Dates
Mr. Deeds

0/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Messing With You Don’t Mess With The Zohan On DVD Is A Waste Of Time.

The Good: Moments of message
The Bad: Not funny, Wastes good cast members, Predictable, Lame character development, Moments of message
The Basics: A terrible film not worth anyone's time or attention, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is not funny, not clever and certainly not constructive.


Sometimes, it is only in assembling lists that I discover I have overlooked something I thought I had reviewed. For example, when I was making my list of the "Worst Films Of 2008,” I discovered that I had never actually penned a review of the film You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, even though it easily made that list. Now on DVD, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is just as bad and a film I loathed having to suffer through again.

Whenever people pitch the "worst movie of the year" or make grandiose claims that certain films are the worst film of a certain time frame, I suspect they forget about works like You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. So, for example, for all of the problems some reviewers had with Twilight, it is hard to take them seriously when they declare that film to be worse than You Don’t Mess With The Zohan or The Love Guru. Similarly, when people claim that 2008 wasn't all that bad in the theaters, my first questions tend to be "Did you see Disaster Movie or (Stupid) Quarantine?" I preface my considerations of You Don’t Mess With The Zohan with these thoughts because it is an utter waste of time, talent and the DVD medium. And sitting through it twice now just left me feeling robbed of time and life.

Zohan is an Israeli secret agent who has no greater ambitions than to cut hair. A superstar in Israel, he dances, plays hackey sack, has sex with many women and catches numerous things - like a fish - in his butt. As the violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians escalates, Zohan sees no potential end to the violence and the rise of an equally powerful adversary, the Phantom, leaves him wishing for more.

So, Zohan fakes his own death by appearing to let the Phantom defeat him in hand-to-hand combat. As many women mourn the loss of Zohan, he escapes to the United States where he assumes an alter ego as a hairdresser. As a corrupt real estate developer moves in on a New York City neighborhood, Zohan raises business at Dahlia's boutique by cutting hair and having sex with all of her clients. Soon, though, Zohan is spotted by a man he once wronged, Salim, who is furious over Zohan taking his goat some years before. Salim threatens to expose the Phantom as a fraud for not killing the Zohan and they converge upon Zohan at a sham hackey sack tournament as the real estate developer hires some white supremacists to burn everything down.

Every now and then, there is a movie that just makes one sit up and say "wow, this is a stupid movie." You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is one such stupid movie, but not for all of the reasons one might think. For example, a comedy about Arab and Israeli relations is about due. The fundamental concept of this flick is not a bad one. The problem is in the execution. So, for example, watching Adam Sandler as the Zohan grill naked and shoot a fish out of his butt has no real redeeming value. And by the time that the viewer gets to more telling, quirky funny bits like Salim's obsession with the goat Zohan once took, the viewer already does not care. Why? In between there are a slew of jokes that virtually all boil down to the idea that it is somehow funny that Zohan has sex with middle aged women or senior citizens of all body types.

Moreover, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is so forced with its generic and stupid form of humor that it has to telegraph it. This is essentially the function of Gail's son. Gail takes the Zohan in and her son walks in on Zohan and her repeatedly having sex. The joke then is about the son's revulsion and as most of the things with that character, the lines he delivers are essentially saying, "this is what you ought to be laughing at." The problem is, this type of humor is likely to only appeal to the 13 year-old members of the PG-13 audience. And of those, it's not even the brightest and certainly not the most mature 13 year-olds that will find it funny.

By the time the humor gets around to actually being political, it is far too late and hardly funny. So, when Zohan's friends in New York City begin talking politics, the conversation soon degenerates into a conversation on which politician's wives each of the men would be willing to have sex with.

Far more insidious in the film is the equation of Israelis and Arabs with terrorists, though to be fair to Sandler, Smigel and the other writers, they are indiscriminate in their prejudice. Both the Israeli characters and the Palestinian ones are heavily armed and have all sorts of weapons just laying around. This - even in the context of a comedy - reinforces the prejudice that "they" are all terrorists. And it is in that regard that the film has its one decent exchange of dialogue. One Arab character says "People hate us because they think we are terrorists!" to which an Israeli character notes, "People hate us because they think we are you!" There is plenty of hate to go around in You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and unfortunately, when it is not overtly combating the hate, it is subversively reinforcing the worst prejudices about the Israelis and the Palestinians.

At least as offensive is the sheer amount of talent that You Don’t Mess With The Zohan wastes. Talented comedians show up for quick appearances that do not utilize their talents or make them the butt of jokes pertaining to one aspect of their personality. So, for example, Chris Rock's appearance as a cab driver is short and disappointing. That George Takei, Dave Allen and Kevin Nealon went anywhere near this movie is unfortunate.

And of the principles, one tends to expect what they get from both Adam Sandler (who plays Zohan) and Rob Schneider, who is "disguised" as the Arab Salim, but that John Turturro gets sucked into this crapfest is just offensive. Turturro has a great ability to play comedic as well as dramatic. And I had to watch Cradle Will Rock (reviewed here!) after seeing this movie on DVD just to cleanse my palate because Turturro plays a character of such integrity in that film. But in You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, Turturro is wasted, even with his sense of comedy. As the Phantom, he flops with the physical comedy and the verbal gags are hardly funny enough to waste his abilities on.

Now on DVD, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan includes a bevy of deleted scenes which add nothing to the movie, featurettes on the behind-the-scenes antics and development of the movie and commentary tracks that are not funny either. Those who find this movie funny are hardly the type who will enjoy commentary tracks and Sandler and Schneider, who both appear on the commentary track, are particularly unenlightening about anything in regards to the movie.

For those even considering You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, just ask yourself if there isn't some better way to waste two hours of your life. Having wasted over four hours on this insipid "comedy," I can tell you: there are better uses of your time!

For other works with Nick Swardson, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
30 Minutes Or Less
Just Go With It
Bolt
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry
Almost Famous

1.5/10

For other movie reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Disappointing, But Still Enough Good To Recommend, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.

The Good: Moments of humor, Ultimately a pro-tolerance stance, Moments of acting, DVD bonus features
The Bad: Pulls punches, Pacing, Predictable plot
The Basics: Funny, but hardly a timeless comedy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry has a basic premise and ultimately promotes tolerance of gay and lesbian civil rights.


Lately, I have found myself watching a lot of movies to keep my partner happy, though I am generally glad to do that. The other day, she had a rough day at work - she works at a pet store and a puppy had to be put down because another worker administered the dog a pill, which ended up in the animal's lung! - and she wanted a movie to take her mind off her day. So, we went to our library and I let her pick out a film. The one we ended up watching was I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and it served its purpose, to distract her from what was going on.

The problem with I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is that once one hears the title, they pretty much get the entire concept of the movie and the execution of that concept offers few surprises or laughs. The movie is entirely predictable, is unimpressive in terms of scope or even the delivery of its message. For those looking for a pro-gay rights film, the comedy makes jokes that are often too awkward to be considered truly open minded and the movie takes no real risks in terms of storytelling. In many ways, it becomes a very typical Adam Sandler film.

Chuck and Larry are New York City firefighters who are best friends. They wisecrack as they put out fires and perform rescues and their lives seem generally content. Chuck is a womanizer who is happily promiscuous and untied to any one woman, while Larry is a widower raising two children. When Chuck nearly plummets to his death during an investigation of a burnt-out building, he is rescued by Larry. Larry, in the process, comes to realize that his children are not protected by his benefits package, which still names his dead wife as the beneficiary. Because of an administrative error, the benefits cannot be transferred unless Larry gets married.

Larry, then, decides to call in Chuck's promise of doing anything for his friend in gratitude for being saved by him; he asks Chuck to be his domestic partner so his if he dies, Chuck could take care of his kids. After a patent reluctance, Chuck agrees. Soon after they become domestic partners, a special investigator - Clint Fitzer - is dispatched to look into the partnership, alleging fraud. Chuck moves in with Larry, their boss finds out about the partnership and subsequent marriage and soon all of the firehouse is disturbed by Chuck and Larry being "out." As the two men work to save themselves from jail, Chuck finds himself attracted to their lawyer, Alex, who is eager to defend the two men and their right to their marriage.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is a pretty standard Adam Sandler vehicle, including appearances by Sandler's Saturday Night Live alums Rob Schneider - in an utterly insulting role as the Asian priest who marries Chuck and Larry in Canada - and David Spade. This means that Adam Sandler plays yet another generally mild-mannered guy who speaks abrasively with a sense of innocence about him. Sandler as the womanizing Chuck has little real difference from his character in Mr. Deeds (reviewed here!), save that Chuck is smarter. As is his (apparent) trademark, there is also the requisite scene of extreme violence where Sandler beats the crap out of someone with a supposedly comedic flair. Sandler's characters almost always have an angry outburst and Chuck is no exception. This is disturbing more for what the screenwriters are apparently saying about women - virtually everyone who looks at Chuck and Larry as a couple suspects Chuck takes a traditionally feminine role in their relationship - than it does about gays.

Kevin James plays Larry and this might be the first role I've actually seen James play that is a major film role. He seems pretty much like he appears in the few clips of King Of Queens I've caught which suggests that his presence as a good, generally happy guy is the result of good casting as opposed to any form of inspired acting. The problem here is that Larry has moments when he has a melancholy that James seems unable to play. He does not carry the emotional resonance of a man pining for his wife who has been dead for two years. Instead, he slouches through the role alternating the comedic and dramatic moments with little differentiation in his performance.

Supporting roles by Jessica Biel, Ving Rhames and Dan Aykroyd all outshine Sandler and certainly James. Biel plays the lawyer, Alex, and while she and Sandler might have only minimal on-screen chemistry, she plays the role with an earnest innocence that makes her part funny and believable. She plays Alex as educated in her field, but somewhat ignorant outside it, which works. Similarly, Aykroyd's supporting role has him as a believable gruff leader and he pulls the part off quite well.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is alternately funny and offensive and this is a movie where it largely gets away with its gay jokes because Chuck's use of an anti-gay slur change by the end of the movie. As well, the ultimate message of the film is one of tolerance, that homosexuality ought not to be a limiting factor to one's quality of life or experiences and as a result, there is still some social value to the movie.

Realistically, that value is somewhat limited and there are much better movies about actual gay or lesbian love, like The Incredibly True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love whereas this explores a legal loophole in domestic partnership law which few gay and lesbian activists care about (i.e. we'd rather have domestic partnership and actual marriage laws that heterosexual couples might abuse as opposed to being denied them entirely). The plot is entirely predictable, as are the character arcs. Because the "rightness" of freedom and the rights of all people to be married and be happy are so strong, the viewer knows that Chuck and Larry will not get away with their deception (it's that kind of movie where an absolute right must be preserved for any suspension of disbelief to be maintained). As well, because Chuck is a womanizer, the viewer pretty much figures that he will grow by the end and lo and behold, he does.

The DVD presentation of I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry includes about ten minutes of deleted scenes, one of which answers the question of how a guy like Chuck manages to go so long without having sex with a woman once he is married to Larry. There is a commentary track and a featurette and these are pretty much standard for a comedy of this type. They are not bad, but they are hardly exceptional.

But that is pretty much how best to define I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry; it is remarkably average, but not superlative in any way.

For other works with Nick Swardson, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
30 Minutes Or Less
Just Go With It
Bolt

6/10

For other movie reviews, be sure to visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the films I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Wildly Erratic, Just Go With It Was Not All It Was Cracked Up To Be.

The Good: Moments of fun, Good beginning and end, Moments of acting.
The Bad: Very weak middle, Predictable plot, Much of the acting
The Basics: For all the hype, Just Go With It is an awkward mix of predictable, cluttered and delightfully surprising.


Lately, I've been catching up on movies I missed in their theatrical release that I think my wife or I might like. Last night, that took the form of us getting in the Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It, which both of us had heard very good things about. While my wife is a big fan of Adam Sandler's works, I've enjoyed many of Jennifer Aniston's works more. Even when Aniston is in a movie that does not wow me as much, she tends to illustrate fairly impressive range, as she did in Horrible Bosses (reviewed here!). So, I was not unenthusiastic about watching Just Go With It.

To be fair to Just Go With It, the movie starts well enough. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how fast it got to its own point. In that way, Just Go With It is a very direct movie. And it lands the ending. Just Go With It arrives at a sensible, if obvious, conclusion where one feels like the characters have reached an end that is fairly fulfilling. But in between, Just Go With It is a convoluted farce that is just a mess. I love Frasier (reviewed here!) and when the show started doing farce episodes, it was a real treat. They were funny, clever and oftentimes some of the most memorable episodes of the series. But they also were not protracted and Just Go With It is. Dragging the farcical elements out makes Just Go With It tedious and surprisingly not funny in the middle portion of the movie.

Danny Maccabee is heartbroken when, on the eve of his wedding, he discovers his fiance has been cheating on him and does not truly think much of him. Ditching her, he gets plastic surgery to correct his nose and he discovers there is an entire class of young, datable women who go for married guys. So, he trolls for women by going to bars, wearing his wedding ring and letting himself get picked up by one night stands. For almost twenty years, he does this while he watches his assistant, Katherine, deal with divorce and children. But one night, Danny goes to a party and without trying finds himself in an engaging conversation with a woman, Palmer. The two hit it off, spend the night together talking on the beach and it looks like they have all the elements for a substantial relationship.

Unfortunately for Danny, when he suggests Palmer take one of his business cards for his phone number, Palmer discovers the fake wedding ring in his pocket. When Palmer storms off, Danny laments to Katherine how he thinks he has blown something that could actually be wonderful. In conversing with Katherine, Danny decides that the way out of the situation is to lie to Palmer about how he and his wife are getting a divorce. That ruse comes close to working . . . until Palmer insists on meeting Danny's soon to be ex-wife. Danny has Katherine impersonate his wife, which she does in exchange for a pretty fabulous shopping spree, and the arrangement goes off without a hitch until Katherine takes a call from the babysitting and Danny is forced to lie about having children! Things spiral out of control for Danny and his lies when, during a meeting between the kids and Palmer, Katherine's son, Michael, manipulates Palmer and Danny into a Hawaiian vacation. Forced together on vacation, Danny tries to keep all of his lies from unraveling and Palmer in love with him while circumstances out of his control pull him in supposedly unexpected directions.

One of the main problems with Just Go With It is that, because it is working in a film comedy medium where virtually everything has to be squeezed into the (in this case) two hour running time, certain elements quickly become obvious to a seasoned moviegoer. As the film turns toward being a farce - arguably the moment that Danny's brother Eddie, as Dolph the man Katherine (as Devlin) allegedly had an affair with, in effect ruining the Danny/Devlin marriage - it becomes obvious that writers Allan Loeb, Timothy Dowling and I.A.L. Diamond are going with a very traditional mentality of the farce. To me, that meant that every lie would become much more complicated through the addition of more information that has the potential to complicate a lie already in play. So, for example, when Katherine tells the story about Devlin and Danny uses the name Devlin for his soon-to-be-ex-wife, I knew it was a waiting game for the actual Devlin to enter the movie. And, in Hawaii, there she is! The "magic" of the farce is in seeing how the convoluted lies are maintained or how they all fall apart. In the case of Just Go With It, there is an amusing moment when "Dolph" throws Palmer in the water to prevent her from outing "Devlin" to Devlin, but after the initial shock and humor, the scene become uncomfortable and unfunny as Dolph almost drowns Palmer!

The formulaic elements are not limited to the farce elements in Just Go With It, either. The moment Danny begins illustrating any real empathy for Katherine's children, Just Go With It becomes a weird character trivia formula story. In other words, every randomly mentioned factoid about the peripheral characters comes into play as a chance for the main protagonists to grow. So, when "Bart" (Michael's assumed identity for his interactions with Palmer) mentions that he is sad because his father is never around and that he does not know how to swim, Katherine gets a chance to be wowed by Danny actually bonding with the kids and teaching Michael to swim.

Despite the predictability and moments when Adam Sandler is recycling his performances from prior works - we get that his schtick is that high-pitched mumbling thing, but performances like in Punch-Drunk Love illustrate that he actually has exceptional range - Just Go With It actually does have some very positive elements. The opening to Just Go With It is very funny and the end has charm coming out of all orifices. The middle - especially the parts with Nicole Kidman as Devlin and a disturbingly bland Dave Matthews - go for more obvious jokes and linger annoyingly long on Eddie, Palmer's body and setting up less successful jokes that are played out in the end. Added to that, Just Go With It has one of the best flirtation scenes I have ever seen in all of film. In that scene, set in a hotel hallway, Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler deliver some great dialogue in the most convincing performances I have seen from either in quite some time. I would be even more impressed were I to learn that they actually could not stand one another, the chemistry was just that good!

Jennifer Aniston and the absolutely ridiculous Bailee Madison are the shining stars of Just Go With It. Madison, who plays Katherine's daughter Maggie (Kiki D in the deceptions), is incredibly good with the cockney accent and, to her credit, she never slips from it at any inappropriate time, putting to shame many actresses who do work with accents! While not much humor is put on her plate to dispense, she gives a decent performance. Similarly, Jennifer Aniston convincingly plays a hard-working assistant who develops through the course of the film to a reasonable epiphany. Her character does not simply feel like a reworking of Rachel or her Love Happens protagonist. Instead, Just Go With It gives her a chance to have fun and create a viable parent character put in a ridiculous situation.

Ultimately, Just Go With It had moments of amusement, but the middle was too chaotic, predictable and just not funny for me to recommend.

For other works with Nick Swardson, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
30 Minutes Or Less
Bolt

4/10

For other movies, check out my organized listing on the Movie Review Index Page!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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One Of The Worst Movies Of Late, Jack And Jill Enters The Holiday Cinematic Slump Poorly.

The Good: Moments of acting, One or two jokes.
The Bad: Mostly not funny, Light on character, Lack of decent plot, Much of the acting is bad.
The Basics: Jack And Jill flops into the expected position around the holidays with a predictable, terribly un-funny film.


Movies have some very cyclical seasons, something I became very much aware of a few years back when I was at a screening of Four Christmases (reviewed here!). Usually, right before Oscar Pandering Season - the late-November, December period wherein all of the major studios put out the movies they hope will get Best Picture and acting awards - there is a family friendly time around the holidays when the studios put out some of the suckiest, schlockiest movies that couldn't even hold up during the September Slump. In the last few years, Oscar Pandering Season has been broken up to surround the Holiday Slump. This year, The Help (reviewed here!) opened up Oscar Pandering Season before even the back-to-school slump. My point here, at the beginning of my review of Jack And Jill is that it ought not to have been any surprise at all that the movie, released right at the open of the Holiday Slump, was just plain terrible.

And it is. Jack And Jill is easily as bad as one might expect from the hundreds of previews aired in the last two weeks during every single network comedy. Part of the reason for that is that it returns Adam Sandler to the mindless fare that made him after he left Saturday Night Live. Desperately paired at various points with his former peers David Spade, Tim Meadows, Norm MacDonald, and Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler reminds the viewers that he became funny more on gimmicks than a genuine sense of comic genius.

Jack Sadelstein is an advertising executive who has been trying hard to get Al Pacino to appear in one of the commercials he is directing. His wife, Erin, puts up with his antics and raises their two children. For Thanksgiving, Jack's twin sister, Jill, comes to visit. She is more manic than he is and Jack frequently mocks her. After Thanksgiving, Jill does not leave and the while Jack is irritated that she has remained, Erin is a bit more empathetic to her.

Jill lags around the house and town, but in the process actually runs into Al Pacino. As the Jack and Jill interact, they learn to relate better and . . . who cares?

It's hard to stretch out writing even two paragraphs about the plot of Jack And Jill for the simple reason that the film is not as all about things that happen or even the characters that make them happen. Jack And Jill is a gimmick film. The whole point of it is to have Adam Sandler play a character - Jill - in drag. What happens in Jack And Jill is secondary to the shock value of seeing Sandler in a dress, a miniskirt and other female garb. The problem the movie runs into - other than rampant misogyny - is that the shock value wears off - in fact, if you've seen one preview, the shock value already is gone.

The key to a successful gimmick comedy - Bubba Ho-Tep (reviewed here!) is the highest-rated example of a gimmick comedy - is to use the gimmick to then say something larger than the gimmick. So, for example, in Bubba Ho-Tep when the geriatric Elvis and JFK go to fight a mummy, they learn their celebrity was not a fluke, they actually have talent and vitality. The two men bond to realize that, despite the fact that they have been dead to the world, they have a promise and power that is substantial. In other words, they find their worth and the battle with the mummy is metaphorical and makes a larger statement on the comedic gem of the premise of an old Elvis and a black John F. Kennedy living in a nursing home.

Jack And Jill has no such larger theme. Instead, it is a formulaic plot movie where the comedy comes not from anything fundamental from the characters. It is the set-up and that wears thin. Fast.

As for the acting, Adam Sandler will not be the next Eddie Murphy. Jill is in no way a fully realized character; she is Adam Sandler in drag and Sandler illustrates that his abilities toward the qualitative were something of a fluke. Sandler wowed audiences with real characters who were complex and different from others he had done in movies, like Punch-Drunk Love (Reviewed here!). Jack And Jill is a relapse from Adam Sandler along the road to quality performances and complex characters.

Sandler does not drag down others with him; they throw themselves in front of his train willingly. Most notable is Katie Holmes, who takes one of the least worthwhile supporting performances in the history of comedy as Erin. Holmes has pretty much put the final nail in her career's coffin. Who else would turn down The Dark Knight but take Jack And Jill?

Ultimately, Jack And Jill is not funny, it is not clever and it is not at all original. In the end, it is a waste not only of the money to see it in theaters, but the time one could be doing . . . pretty much anything else.

For other works with Katie Holmes, please check out my reviews of:
Thank You For Smoking
Batman Begins
Dawson's Creek - Season One
Wonder Boys

2.5/10

For other movie reviews, be sure to visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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