Rating:

What do you do when it’s a long holiday weekend and you’re stuck home working through it? You download movies and watch them while you work. So today I grabbed Adam Sandler’s latest: “Grown Ups”.

The reviews of this one were pretty bad, but I think the critics and movie-goers were looking for something that this film was not. They figured with so many comedians in the cast (Chris Rock, David Spade, etc.) it would be a joke-fest. It wasn’t that kind of movie at all – it never tried to be – it was more like the Carol Burnett/Alan Alda movie “The Four Seasons” about old friends getting together for vacation and the way life had affected them. Albeit funnier, and with fart jokes.

No, this isn’t a belly-laugh kind of movie. There are some good gags and running gags as well, but the beauty of the movie is the chemistry of the cast and that they actually stuck to point all the way through. Too often a studio will sell out for the cheap laughs and the resulting product falls apart. Sandler stuck to the point which is that friendships last and are of value … and can endure all manner of weirdness and strife and emerge stronger than ever.

The cast also stayed consistent throughout. Rock is a hen-pecked husband, Kevin James the overweight under-achiever, Spade the pervert, Rob Schneider is … another kind of pervert, and Sandler is the one who made it big and misses the simpler times. They didn’t wander into stand-up or schtick. They stuck to script and it worked.

Would I have paid $11 for this in a theatre? Yeah, but I would have felt a little ripped off for that price. It’s not a bad movie … nowhere as bad as the critics said. It got a little slow-paced in places and, yes, it could have been funnier. You could see what Sandler was going for but it just didn’t quite make it. I think they needed at least one or two real actors – instead of comic actors – in the cast to get it to that next level.

But if you’re in the mood for a funny feel-good kind of summer movie some afternoon, this isn’t a bad watch.