There are no films worse than bad comedies. In a poorly-made horror or drama film, the viewer can at least laugh at the ineptitude on the screen. But with a comedy, you're supposed to laugh, and when that fails, all you can do is stare and shake your head in disbelief.
I bring this up because Grown Ups most definitely falls into this category. Never before have I seen so many talented actors and such a workable plot synopsis squandered so horribly. There are a few sparse laughs scattered through the film's far-too-long 102 minutes, but most of them are lowbrow and are merely slight chuckles.
The film follows five men who, in 1978, won a basketball championship with their coach, affectionately referred to as "Buzzer" (Blake Clark). Thirty years later, coach Buzzer has died, and the team reunites for his funeral. I cannot remember four out of the five protagonists' names, because it's impossible to see them as anything other than Kevin James, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and David Spade making complete mockeries of themselves. Rob Schneider is already a mockery, however, and I remember his character's name: it's Rob. How creative.
After the aforementioned funeral ends, the plot completely derails into a series of largely unconnected vignettes, tied together by the flimsy premise of the men and their families spending a week together at a lake house. This development is never mentioned at the funeral, so it was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision. Some of the "gems" include James' wife breast feeding her four-year-old son (that's a recurring gag, by the way), a group of misinformed children begging their parents to let them get "wasted", repeated references to Rock's mother-in-law's chronic flatulence, a 15-minute trip to a water park that contains literally no detectable jokes, and an idiotic "game" where one shoots an arrow into the air and tries to dodge it, and which ends with Rob being stabbed through the foot (which is sort of funny, because Rob Schneider suffers).
There are numerous other familiar actors aside from the main five (such as Maya Rudolph, Salma Hayek, Norm MacDonald, Blake Clark, Gary Busey, and Steve Buscemi), but none of them seem to be any more interested in what they're doing, and some don't seem to have even cleaned themselves (Buscemi, especially, looks like he has just ended a five-year exile to a dark basement).
The dialogue and "humor" in this film is akin to watching home videos of people you don't know. The characters spend much of the running time insulting each other and spouting inside jokes, which are never explained. If I knew these characters, I might have enjoyed the movie a bit more; of course, if I knew these characters, I'd probably be dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
No director could turn this writing into anything resembling humor, but looking at Dennis Dugan's resume (which consists of such "classics" as Problem Child, Saving Silverman, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, and Beverly Hills Ninja), the screenplay was probably in one of the worst hands possible. Sometimes it seems like the camera isn't even pointed in the right direction, and other times a shot lingers on for far longer than it should. Grown Ups is a mess.
Yes, my friends, Grown Ups is absolutely
Awful!
No comments:
Post a Comment