Pity poor Adam Sandler.
He clearly doesn’t want to make movies. Just look at the expression on his face every time he faces the camera – the visceral pain of an ulcer patient who just swigged from a Tabasco bottle.
But they keep asking him, and he shows up, much to our dismay. Sandler’s latest effort, “Click,” is a 95-minute illustration of the difference between “funny” and “laughable.”
“Click” makes “Waterboy” look like “The Elephant Man,” and “The Longest Yard” look like “Brian’s Song.” Rarely has a comic’s first-grade sensibility synched so smoothly with the filmmakers’ cynical opportunism.
“Click” is a thinly disguised remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and if the association of Adam Sandler with Jimmy Stewart doesn’t make you angry already, perhaps the relentless product placements will. “Click” plays like a series of commercials fleshed out – and I use that term loosely – by Madison Avenue plotting.
Bed, Bath & Beyond; McDonald’s; Twinkies; Huffy bikes … I mention the brand names not to reinforce the evil that is product placement, but so that you may forever associate those names with regrettable cinema.
The briefest of plot descriptions, so as not to give credit where only debit is due: Adam Sandler plays Michael Newman, an architect. Sandler is an architect like Rob Schneider is a brain surgeon, but I digress. Michael’s life is overstuffed with family and work, and he can’t seem to turn on home gadgets with the correct remote.
He goes to the aforementioned toiletries store to buy a universal remote control, and is handed a brand new gadget by mad-scientist Christopher Walken (whose character simultaneously rips off Clarence the Angel and Doc from “Back to the Future,” but I digress). Michael finds the gadget can pause his whole family so he can get his work done, or fast-forward through boring parts like foreplay or sinus infections. (With Adam Sandler, foreplay is indistinguishable from a sinus infection, but I digress.)
Screenwriters Steve Koren & Mark O’Keefe, who did “Bruce Almighty,” a film that “Click” makes look like “The Gates of Heaven” (but I digress), stuff their latest effort with every possible ethnic cliché and potty joke. Saudi businessmen ask for palaces with liquor bars and easy women. Japanese businessmen want to drink. Female co-workers are either “sluts” or childish secretaries who ask permission to use the bathroom.
The recurring joke in “Click” involves the family dog enjoying pneumatic sexual congress with a stuffed duck. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and defiles a duck, it must be an Adam Sandler movie.
The movie becomes even more offensive – tough trick, I know – when it tries to get serious. “Adam Sandler in a poignant deathbed scene” are words never meant to be in the same sentence; as Sandler ages with some of the worst makeup since “The Benny Hill Show,” “Click” explores that broad emotional range between the vile and the maudlin.
More words I never thought I’d put in one sentence: David Hasselhoff is the best thing in the movie.
Why bother giving it even one star? Because Kate Beckinsale is as alluring as Sandler is annoying. Because at the preview, a few in the audience were laughing. But I digress …
Reach Michael Booth at mbooth@denverpost.com; try the “Screen Team” blog at denverpostbloghouse.com
“Click” | * RATING
PG-13 with extremely crude language and humor, sexual references|1 hour, 35 minutes|COMEDY|Directed by Frank Coraci; written by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe; starring Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, Henry Winkler, David Hasselhoff and Julie Kavner|Opens today at area theaters.
