Is Grown Ups the hysterical comedy it should have been, based on the comic talent assembled? Well, no. It’s a mildly funny get-together of some comics. It is as if the audience is getting a sneak peek into their vacation. The laughs (and there are some big ones) in fact work. It’s just that there aren’t enough of them.
The setup is that five friends who were on a high school basketball team are brought together when their old coach passes away. They return for the weekend to the lake house where they celebrated their team’s championship victory. The friends haven’t seen each other for a while. Lenny, Eric, Kurt, Marcus and Rob (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider) all are married with the exception of Marcus, so there are wives and plenty of kids. Lenny, who is a big-time Hollywood agent, is married to Roxanne (Salma Hayak) a famous designer, and in fact the two, along with their kids – two stuck-up brats and a cute little girl – can’t even stay, having to travel to Italy for Roxanne’s fashion show.
The comedy in the screenplay by Sandler and Fred Wolf takes all forms from slapstick (everyone’s seen the trailer with James slamming into a tree), to low-brow, to verbal. There’s the 4-year-old son of Eric and Sally (Maria Bello) who still breastfeeds, Kurt’s mother in-law (Ebony Jo-Ann) who never misses an opportunity to “ride him” on just about everything, and oh, she has a flatulence problem. There are also the five guys the group beat in the championship game, and they desperately want a rematch.
Grown Ups is a big missed opportunity. The screenplay is dull. Maybe Sandler wanted to get the feeling of a group of old friends getting their families together for a time, hanging out and seeing what funny things could transpire. That’s all well and good, but there should have been some flow to it. Yes, the physical humor works, but it’s too laid back. Director Dennis Dugan, an old hand with Sandler (he’s directed five of Sandler’s films), never pushes the action. The film has a stop and start way about it. One gag ends, dead space, another gag begins. The only time the film takes off is when everyone hits a water park. That section of the film is funny and shows the friendship and family connection that the rest of the film desperately tries to convey.
One can’t blame Sandler for trying something different. He’s done it in the past with Click (2006), Anger Management (2003), and Reign Over Me (2007), and there have been others, even last year’s Funny People. They haven’t all been successful, but at least they all felt like he put more than a little effort into them. With Grown Ups it feels like he thought having his comic friends together would be enough, but it’s just all right.
SOURCE: Wicked Local Plymouth
