When will Adam Sandler learn that no matter how big the budgets get, no matter how weird the plot, no matter how decorative the minutiae, he cannot simply regurgitate the same film over and over again?
In his latest offering, 50 First Dates, Sandler plays Henry Roth, a Hawaii-based love ’em and leave ’em type who caters exclusively to lonesome female tourists who can’t seem to get enough of the love doctor.
When Henry’s not knocking ’em dead, he spends his days working on his boat and high-fiving aquatic mammals at Hawaii’s version of Sea World.
It’s a bachelor’s life for him until he meets Lucy (Drew Barrymore) one morning at a diner. After some flirtatious fun (Building a house out of waffles! How quirky!), the two realize they are clearly in love and make plans to meet the next morning for breakfast.
However, during an “artistic” flashback, we learn that Lucy was in a car accident involving a cow and lost her short-term memory.
Henry decides he must take action, and with the help of a crew of wacky characters (including “Wacky Wheelchair Guy” – no, really), he sets out to win back Lucy’s love, even if it means doing so every day for the rest of his life. Something akin to – to borrow a phrase from Sandler – “slappy-booby-doo” ensues.
50 First Dates is a boilerplate Sandler farce, especially unfortunate given the potential he showed in Punch-Drunk Love. But, you simply cannot take the poop jokes out of the idiot-boy.
Sandler once again plays the fidgety, mildly retarded, aw-shucks guy, but this time, he seems genuinely bored with it all.
The film actually repeats jokes from previous films as though it were a Sandler movie highlight reel: Back is the weird minority character (this time Henry’s oddly androgynous German assistant), the lobotomy-induced idiot boy dances and, most importantly, Rob Schneider.
This time around, Schneider puts away his award-winning hip-hop anonymous man and comes up with a character of alleged Hawaiian descent, sporting an accent somewhere between Mexico and the Kremlin.
There are some signs of life in this rickety old horse, including a hilarious Sean Astin as Lucy’s juiced-up, lisping, overprotective, muscle-shirt-wearing brother Doug.
Spending three years gracing screens in hobbit feet and tears certainly merits a comic turn as loose and fun to watch as this.
Another plus is the Hawaii setting. Despite the idiots running around, the film, directed by Peter Segal (Anger Management) with all the finesse of a Welch’s grape juice ad, actually manages to wrangle a few genuinely beautiful shots from the burning wreckage of poop jokes and the like.