Sunday, February 20, 2011

Go Your Own Way

Dennis Dugan's newest assault on audience intelligence, Just Go With It, is as inept and benign as American "comedy" can get.

Adam Sandler is a silly man boy, as we all know, but has showed a more fascinating side in one unadulterated American masterpiece (P.T. Anderson's Punchdrunk Love), one underrated, excellent work (James L. Brooks' Spanglish) and one surprisingly adroit film (Judd Apatow's Funny People). But we all need to make a living, and, let's face it, those movies didn't pay the bills.

It's just unfortunate that Sandler, his writers and producers, can't find a happy medium to create comedies that are both raucous and good, that don't drag out the dead horses and beat them into oblivion. The entire crowd isn't eleven years old. He's made some decent comedies -Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer - but, unfortunately, Just Go With It, a pitiful remake of the 60's comedy Cactus Flower, joins the dung heap. Sandler and Aniston shamelessly mug, and the jokes are only intermittently chuckle worthy. Nick Swardson and Brooklyn Decker are the only casualties who emerge relatively unscathed.

Good American comedy is so hard to come by that when it does arrive, rejoice is mandatory. Just Go With It misses, sadistically, by miles.

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