Rated PG-13 for brief drug references, partial nudity, language and frequent crude/sexual content
Cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Brooklyn Decker, Bailee Madison, Nicole Kidman
Director: Dennis Dugan
I haven't laughed nearly as much in the last few Sandler comedies, and barely cracked a smile in "Just Go With It". It's a comedy that expends much more energy in attempting to find the humor in the situation than it does actually delivering it. Sandler has gone from living on the fringe of comedy to playing the straight man here, navigating a sea of borderline lunatic personalities.
The movie is based on a French stage play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. Movies like this can work, but they need to possess a rising tide of comic madness. High energy. Lunacy. An undercurrent of desperation. This version is D.O.A. The characters seemed no more intrigued by the plot than I did. A premise like this needs to hit the ground running. You can't do that when you hit face first.
Sandler plays Danny, a successful plastic surgeon with an outlook on love so cynical that he has decided the best way to avoid a broken heart is to pose as a married man in nightclubs as a means to attract women he needn't call on again. His method works for a while, until he meets the woman of his dreams... a tall, stunning, twenty-three-year-old N'Sync fan named Palmer (Brooklyn Decker). He doesn't pose as a married man with her. They spend a night on the beach but in the morning she finds his "ring" in his pants pocket, assumes he's married. Uh-oh. With a little quick thinking, Danny tells her he's getting a divorce. Palmer wants to meet the wife anyway. He enlists the help of his longtime assistant at the office, the kind-hearted single mother Katharine (Jennifer Aniston). He wants her to pose as his wife. She reluctantly agrees. Through a series of plot developments, Danny, Palmer, Katharine, Danny's brother Eddie (Nick Swardson) and Katharine's kids (Bailee Madison and Griffin Gluck) find themselves taking a week-long vacation together in Hawaii.
(Out of sheer boredom, I began to calculate the amount of money Danny was spending. Between the high-end designer outfits to make Katharine look more like "a plastic surgeon's wife", the plane tickets, the meals, the excursions, the $12,000 per night room... the price tag had to be nearing the six-figure mark. That's a high price to pay for a happy ending. Any happy ending.)
I know nothing about the material upon which this premise is based, but Allan Loeb and Tim Dowling's screenplay contains very few actual zingers. It's more a cacophony of rambling dialogue in search of a punch line. There's no real sense of urgency, either. We never understand why Palmer seems so special, beyond the fact that she's played by Brooklyn Decker. Sandler and Aniston do seem comfortable in their scenes together, though it takes an excruciatingly long time for their characters to catch up to their feelings.
I don't have a problem with Sandler being the straight man in a comedy so long as the comedy is funny. I felt bad for him here. Nor do I enjoy piling on the spotty-at-best movie career of Jennifer Aniston, as it seems tantamount to bludgeoning a puppy. Acting-wise, she's pretty much tethered herself to her comfort zone. Sure, she's likable. But is it really asking too much for that likability to be at the service of something other than a comic crutch?
Nick Swardson and Bailee Madison have a little fun with the quirks of their characters, although said quirks do grow tiresome after a while. The juiciest bits of humor come from Nicole Kidman as Devlin, a spotlight-stealing sorority sister of Katharine's who has an impeccable sense of bad timing, and Dave Matthews as her hubby, whose existence is to support Devlin's facade of vacuous success.
No points for guessing how the story plays itself out. Danny overcomes his fear of heartbreak. But if you ask me, he still has problems. If you have the head-scratching temerity to dole out a six-figure dollar amount for a vacation to support a lie in an effort to win over a beautiful woman only to find out that the person you truly love is someone you've known a majority of your life... the potential for a broken heart is the least of your worries.
* out of * * * * stars
