‘Just Go With It’ Movie Review
It’s easy to criticize Adam Sandler for making the same
trashy movies over and over again, but he’s made enough genuinely impressive
movies (Funny People springs to mind,
and Bedtime Stories is still
awaiting the recognition it deserves) to earn him the right to revert back to
his bread-and-butter once in a while. Besides, the man’s just funny without
even really trying. That’s pretty rare.
So the premise is pretty goofy, but it’s just a setup to allow Sandler to do what he does best. He plays a plastic surgeon named Danny Maccabee who suffers from emotional scarring left over from a bad divorce. The death of a marriage is a traumatic event, but it furnished Danny with the brilliant idea of sporting a fake wedding ring and picking up women by convincing them that they’re the only way he can escape the vicious clutches of an abusive, unfaithful wife.
Hatching this or that sob story in order to pick up chicks is nothing original or interesting, but Sandler’s comedy takes flight when his latest mark, a crazy hot blonde named Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) discovers his fake ring. This is where the movie reflects one curious little characteristic of real life – how one tiny little lie has an unsettling tendency to turn into a whole lot of progressively growing lies.
Jennifer Aniston plays Katherine, Danny’s assistant, who doesn’t know about this little factoid, and so agrees to pose as his abusive, cheating wife in order to help Danny win the heart of the woman he thinks he loves.
All kinds of comic mayhem ensues as Danny’s ruse becomes
more and more complicated and convoluted, and the ratio of hilarity to
stupidity will depend almost entirely on your opinion of Adam Sandler going
into the movie. The overall premise is undeniably shallow and has been done to
death in countless movies and television shows going back decades, but Sandler
brings us an entertaining and fun update on an old idea, and that’s all I
really ask for at the movies, you know?
I don’t need an Academy Award winner
every time I go to the theater, I just want to be entertained, and this is a
movie that puts entertainment above all else.
Nicole Kidman shows up as Katherine’s old college nemesis and her husband is played by none other than Dave Matthews himself. Some cameos are so welcome that they bump the movie up a notch or two all by themselves, and this is definitely one of them. Nicole Kidman is cool, but Dave Matthews is one of the most talented people alive right now and should really be in more movies.
I will say that the movie had a few too many toilet humor gags for my taste, however. I have come to believe that anything resembling someone defecating into a sleeping man’s hand, for example, and just about all feces-related jokes, should be tossed in the garbage and shipped to Seltzer and Friedberg, like usual. I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to a lot of excessive and gratuitous content in the movies, but I don't know. Crap jokes are just kind of crappy, you know? They're the last resort of a writer without any good ideas, and they've never looked like anything else.
But despite a
little too much 4th grade comedy, the impressive cast turned in good
enough performances and had enough chemistry on screen to keep the surprisingly
long movie entertaining throughout. It's exactly what we've come to expect from the entire Happy Madison team, and I don't recall every being very much let down by their movies. They're consistently childish, sophomoric, and hilariously fun.
It’s an update on the 40-year-old movie Cactus Flower, starring Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, and Ingrid Bergman is essentially the same roles, but has little in common with Sandler’s movie other than the basic story. It gets a little too low-brow a little too often, but it’s a great way to unwind and it delivers exactly what you know it will. And sometimes it’s good to know that you can still go to the movies and get what you pay for.
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