Adam Sandler Needs To Grow Up!

Everybody knows that Adam Sandler is one of the few actor whose movies are critic proof. Adam Sandler has been around since the '90's and his movies were bad then, but they were entertaining. Happy Gilmore will always be one of my all time guilty favorites. However, the '90 are behind and the Sandler movies I used to love went down significantly.

However, in 2002, Sandler starred in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. At that point I realized that Sandler could act. In Punch Drunk Love, Sandler did play the same immature character as always, but in this movie he takes it further. As a result, Adam Sandler tapped into some deep feelings and made the character seem real.

Adam Sandler kept doing the occasional serious role and was quite good at them. Movies like Spanglish and Reign on Me made me respect him as an actual actor. His comedy movie movie started getting worse with each money with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry being the lowest point. Then he starred in last year very underrated Funny People, which is his Magnum Opus.

Now we have Grown Ups and instead of growing up Sandler has stayed in the same safe territory that he is accustomed to. Grown Ups has an all star cast that includes Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider. The plot is simple and thin. It's about these five friends reuniting at a lake house for the 4th of July after their old basketball coach dies. There is no plot after that and it's basically a bunch of one liners after that. What I did like about this movie was the chemistry between the three leads. They really having good comedic timing and they mildly entertained me.

Nevertheless, there was a lot of flaws in the movie. Some of the jokes just fell flat and they were too far in between. David Spade and Rob Schneider were the weakest of the bunch as they just leeched off the other actors. The film is very immature, but if its done right it can be funny like in Step Brothers. It was worse than other Sandler fare because the script just felt so stale and it's like jokes are being recycled from other movies.

All in all the film is bad and it might be worse than Chuck and Larry. I wish Sandler would do more mature stuff because he is certainly more than capable of. This movie looked like a lot of fun to make. The end result generates some laughs, but ultimately unsatisfying. The film will please Adam Sandler fans, but it fails on every other level. This is a rental at best. 2 stars out of 5. The end.