July 1, 2010: Grown Ups
For the latest Adam Sandler entry, he’s rolled out the big guns by featuring a bunch of old buddies in leading roles. Grown Ups looks at a group of longtime friends eschewing their busy lives for a long weekend to get together and see each other, and the timing of this film is understandable as these comedians start seeing the north side of age 40 and begin to reflect on their youth.
A high school basketball game opens the film, and is the standard setup for this type of broad comedic journey, establishing the characters in their youth to heighten the hilarity as we see that they have all just turned into exaggerations of their childhood personalities. Twenty-plus years later, the death of their inspirational coach brings them all together again for a funeral and a cottage long weekend for their families during which they are to scatter his ashes.
We see the family lives of each of the guys, with Sandler as a rich and powerful Hollywood agent with bratty kids and a fashion designer wife (played by Salma Hayek), Chris Rock as an emasculated stay-at-home dad, Rob Schneider as a new-age eccentric with a much older wife, Kevin James with his relatively normal nuclear family but troubled marriage, and David Spade as a still-creepy single guy. The characters are well-matched to the actors’ actual personalities and life situations, with Spade as the only single one and Schneider in particular being a weird guy. Four of the five worked together on Saturday Night Live nearly 20 years ago, and Kevin James (the obvious stand-in for the late Chris Farley) has also known them for years in real life on the stand-up comedy circuit. One of the potential strong points I saw in Grown Ups, which it generally lives up to, is the chemistry among all these guys who have known each other for decades, which leads to plenty of gentle ribbing but obvious love for each other which they carry through to their characters.
I wasn’t so keen on the structure of the film, which was a little too obviously put together to provide comedic set-pieces. Of course there’s a funeral sequence where the group are all reunited in their Sunday best, so a boatload of funeral-appropriate gags are jammed in. Then we move on to the cottage which Sandler has rented and where all of the families are to spend the Fourth of July weekend. There’s endless material to be found in a cottage setting for city folks, and I would be fine if they had left it at that, but in addition they threw in a restaurant scene one evening, and a water park outing on one of the days. I’m all for comedy, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. It’s too disjointed, and the water park in particular feels like it’s been thrown in just as time filler to pad the film out to full running time before the basketball rematch with their old rivals which serves as the climax of the film.
So we’ve got a reasonable but flawed structure for the film. What other pluses and minuses are on the table? Well, the casting is a huge plus, with real female characters rather than throwaways. There’s Hayek as Sandler’s firecracker of a wife who is eventually able to relax and go with the flow of the weekend. Her transformation is too abrupt for my taste, but it’s not a big problem. Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph are great as two of the other spouses, with strengths and flaws of their own, and relating to their husbands in what refreshingly turn out to be equal partnerships. Elsewhere in the cast, former SNLer Colin Quinn and a slightly out of place Steve Buscemi bring some life to the conflict between the two rival basketball teams. Chris Rock is criminally underused, though I won’t bother going off on a speculative tangent suggesting a possible power struggle with Sandler, since the two of them are the most bankable of the gang in Hollywood today.
The PG-13 pedigree of the film is obvious, as everything is kept fairly clean, but that’s fine for this material especially considering how easy it is to go overboard with the R-rated comedies these days. This is a good-natured film seeking a summer family audience, and these old friends can josh around with each other without needing to roll out the F-word or throw in some boobies. There is absolutely too much focus on the ageist jokes about Schneider’s wife, but at least it’s a change from the obvious alternate choice of an endless stream of gay jokes. I wouldn’t recommend Grown Ups to non-fans of these comedians, and it’s not at all high-brow or quality comedy, but it’s passable.
Deliberately middling effort from top comics.
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