Five tired comic actors (Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, in approximate order of increasing lassitude), in a matchingly washed-out image, assemble for the funeral of their childhood basketball coach, panning for a few grains of middle-aged masculine truth and coming up completely empty, everything strained, …
Adam Sandler tries to prove that you can, after all, go home again. Take that, Thomas Wolfe!
Adam Sandler, a would-be hockey player who can't skate, brings his slap-shot skills (and brawling manners) to the professional golf circuit. Gag construction is workmanlike, and Dennis Dugan's directorial touch provides an occasional prod. (Highlight: a fistfight with hoary game-show host Bob Barker in the midst of a Pro-Am tournament.) …
The violence in animation maverick Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 apocalyptic fantasy Wizards could be interpreted as the director’s excuse to get even with TerryToons for all the cute, cuddly creatures he was obliged to draw while under contract with the cartoon studio. Not surprisingly, audiences stayed home in droves. Even today, …
Fans of Adam Sandler will want to have a neighbor read them the following: the latest from Sony Pictures Animation has all the stylistic innovation and visual niceties of a Count Chocula commercial. An unduly protective vampire daddy (Sandler) who runs a restricted resort — the clientele is limited to …
The lively undead. Yes, that's the legendary Mel Brooks you hear lending his voice to Great-Grandpa Vlad in director Genndy Tartakovsky's sequel to his human boy-meets-monster girl romantic comedy for kids, Hotel Transylvania. Maybe that explains the relentless, unending, benumbing avalanche of gags (visual and otherwise), puns, and one-liners — …
Sony’s episodic, dialogue-driven, animated series on vampirism for youngsters rolls on with a third installment, this one set aboard a 20-story ocean liner. Hideous background and character design ahead, captain: the animation is so claustrophobic, one would swear that it was filmed entirely on a Hollywood soundstage. Were those Gremlins …
Sony’s episodic, dialogue-driven, animated series on vampirism for youngsters rolls on with a third installment, this one set aboard a 20-story ocean liner. Hideous background and character design ahead, captain: the animation is so claustrophobic, one would swear that it was filmed entirely on a Hollywood soundstage. Were those Gremlins …
The genius of replacing the Columbia Pictures torch lady with an antifreeze Jell-O mold lasted long enough for incest to set in. With daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) of marrying age, her relationship with daddy Dracula (Adam Sandler’s out, Brian Hull’s in) has matured from electral love to borderline inbreeding. (Drac …
A film about the perils of success. Watch Al Pacino do his damnedest to shed his legacy (and goof on his beloved Shakespeare while he’s at it). Watch Adam Sandler take the lash to himself for getting rich via crass hackwork. Watch them both pretend that what they really want …
David Spade's "white-trash idiot" looks all right in the externals: the metal-band T-shirts, the haircut "like Jane Fonda in Klute." But his creamy-nougat center seems dictated by Adam Sandler's Secrets of Success (Sandler, indeed, is one of the executive producers); and the hot blonde in blue-jean cutoffs (Brittany Daniel: she …
Todd Field's sophomore directing effort, following up his quietly sensationalized In the Bedroom, is less quietly sensationalized, in other words more blaringly sensationalized, and truly more sophomoric. The adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, complete with a snooty third-person-omniscient (i.e., know-it-all) narrator, undoubtedly tells us less about the malaise of …
Starring Adam Sandler. By now, that much -- that little -- should be a sufficient review. To say that he plays the weakling son of Satan -- to say that he plays him as if afflicted with a humpback, a clubfoot, cerebral palsy, throat cancer, and limp lifeless hair -- …
Dumbing-down of Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison-cum-football film, the Sadistic Guards versus the Avenging Convicts, not one of Aldrich's smarter ideas to begin with. (It's now the ESPN era, and the game is broadcast on national television.) Burt Reynolds, the star of the original, is given a token role and his …
Undersexed parents electronically spying on their oversexed teenage kids as a metaphor for the lack of value and worthiness of the human race. If asked why the need for a two-hour chalk talk on cosmicism and the utter insignificance of humanity, Jason Reitman, like the clueless parental figures he contrived …