The Adam Sandler movie machine is its own brand, and it has been going strong since the mid-90s. While he has made a ton of movies over the years, he doesn’t typically revisit any for sequels. One of the few exceptions to this is Grown Ups. Released in 2010, the film got roasted by critics, but obviously made enough money to justify a sequel, and both movies are shown on cable ad nauseam. Therefore, one would think that there is something different about this movie. If audiences liked it so much and Sandler even made a sequel, surely there’s more to it than critics initially thought back in the day.
The story of a group of friends who return to their hometown following the death of their beloved basketball coach is a ripe premise with a lot of possibilities, many of them quite good. Had you given such a concept to someone like Richard Linklater, and we might have gotten a thoughtful and funny reflection about aging. Judd Apatow could have turned it into a raunchy but heartfelt comedy about the good old days and learning to appreciate what we have. Instead, we get a mess of a comedy with no clear goal other than to make another Adam Sandler comedy. So, the answer to the question “Is the Adam Sandler movie really as bad as everyone said in 2010” is yes. Here’s why…
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10 Going Through the Motions
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One of the major problems with Grown Ups is that its plot is entirely paint-by-numbers. It’s as though someone skimmed through a few articles on how to structure a movie, plugged in scenes that fit a vague formula, and called it a day. For instance, the character arcs come out of nowhere in the third act. Everyone literally stands in a circle and confesses something about themselves the audience does not care about. We could barely remember that Eric (Kevin James) drove a fancy car and said he was part owner of a furniture store, but he tells everyone he was lying as if it was a plot thread sewn through the entire narrative. The same goes for the revelation that Lenny (Adam Sandler) canceled his family’s plane tickets to Milan before his wife Roxanne (Salma Hayek) decided they could stay at the cabin a few days longer. Yes, that’s a selfish thing to do, but it’s not like he manipulated her into staying to fit in with his plans. She decided to stay on her own. Why do we have this sudden conflict? Well, most conventional screenwriting advice will tell you that you have to pull characters apart before bringing them back together for the finale. This film does that, but it fails to do the work of setting most of these conflicts up.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
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9 Gender Roles
There are a number of examples of “lazy” jokes in the movie, and we will break them down into a few categories. First: gender roles. The film expects us to find it hilarious that Kurt (played by Chris Rock) likes to cook and clean while his wife works a job. Why is this funny? Traditionally, men work and women clean! Hilarious. Also, every woman in this movie is either there to be ogled, to serve as mini-antagonists in the way of the men getting to do whatever they want, or to be made fun of for how unattractive they are. We’re just supposed to think it’s super funny that not every woman looks like a model, isn’t in their 20s or 30s, and that some women (gasp!) occasionally break wind. These “jokes” are cheap, lazy, and embarrassingly unfunny.
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Instead of relying on genuinely funny jokes based in character, the main cast of Grown Ups continuously points out to the audience when something is meant to be funny. They do this by having something ridiculous happen and immediately cutting to Sandler or David Spade, or whomever, to have them comment on the fact that the thing they just witnessed was ridiculous. It’s like the filmmakers didn’t trust that their audience would understand that it’s probably unhealthy to have a four-year-old still breastfeeding, so the characters constantly remark on it. If the joke isn’t funny enough on its own, explaining it to the audience only makes things worse.
7 Isn’t It Funny?
Then, there are the images, characters, and situations the movie assumes we’ll find funny just ‘cuz. Isn’t it funny that Rob (Rob Schneider) is married to a woman older than him whom nobody finds attractive? Isn’t it hysterical that two of Rob’s daughters don’t resemble him in any way and wear skimpy clothing while his third daughter looks just like him and wears dumpy outfits? Doesn’t it make you laugh that the poor people in the movie are dumb and petty? Isn’t it just so funny that Eric fell on a bird because he’s overweight? Every now and then, a joke comes out of these characterizations, but they are few and far between, and we’re just supposed to laugh because these people are different and don’t fit society’s standards of beauty, manliness, or class, apparently.
6 Unnecessary Antagonists
Grown Ups begins with a children’s basketball game that our protagonists win. Later, they return to their hometown and occasionally bump into the kids they defeated that day, led by Dickie Bailey, played by Colin Quinn. Turns out, those kids are poor and stupid now and still really bitter about what happened. So, they want a rematch. This could have been the plot, but instead, it goes back to the idea that this movie is simply going through the motions. Honestly, the more interesting story is one about grown men learning to appreciate their families and embrace getting older. In that case, age and the passage of time is the antagonist. However, plot formulas demand a final confrontation in the third act, so we’re reminded that these people want a rematch — and they get that rematch. Having Lenny lose the game intentionally to give the other team a win for once is genuinely sweet, but it only creates the illusion of an arc in his character. He’s not someone who defines himself by the basketball game he won as a kid, so blowing the game has zero effect on his character. The only reason this happens is to make us think he learned a lesson.
5 Caricature of character
No one in Grown Ups is a character. They’re either fodder for jokes or deliverers of jokes. They all have a single trait that defines them and that’s it. A few of them feel like characters (Lenny, Roxanne, Deanne, and Sally), but they’re one-dimensional plot devices. Everyone else is a cartoon with exaggerated personalities that serve no other purpose than to be made fun of or do outlandish things, so the movie can at least look like something funny is happening. Had the filmmakers decided to add just a hint of depth, then maybe the whole endeavor would have felt worthwhile since the audience would be able to identify with the cast as people. Instead, every scene comes off as meandering and utterly pointless.
4 Body-Shaming
Remember when they introduced Eric as an adult in the movie? He’s so fat, he broke the swimming pool. If you liked that, then you’re going to love the rest of Grown Ups. Anyone who is even remotely overweight is constantly mocked and ridiculed for no other reason than they happen to not be skinny. The same goes for anyone older than the main cast, or anyone who looks different. The movie constantly makes fun of the fact that Rob is short and two of his daughters look like models. There’s even a scene where an employee of a water park just flat-out says he couldn’t be their father because they’re hot. When he sees the third daughter, though, he just calls her “fugly” to her face. That’s not even a joke. Nothing happens to the guy, either. He just calls a young woman fugly and the movie cuts to something else. It’s the equivalent of just pointing and laughing at someone in public just because they look different. She’s unattractive, get it? That’s meant to be funny.
3 Forced Sentimentality
As audience members, we typically appreciate movies that affect us emotionally. If you can make us laugh and bring a tear to our eyes, we’re putty in your hand. That emotion has to be earned, though. You can’t have scene after scene of obnoxious comedy and then suddenly stop everything to have characters reflect on something important before diving right back into unfunny jokes and expect the viewers to buy it. The scene where the main characters spread their late coach’s ashes could have been powerful. Instead, it’s dull because in the scene directly before it, Eric relieves himself in public and everyone jokes about it, and he gets made fun of by strangers. There’s no tonal consistency whatsoever and that makes it virtually impossible for us to care.
2 What Did Steve Buscemi Do to Deserve This?
There is a tradition of putting Steve Buscemi in Adam Sandler movies, where all he has to do is act like an idiot. While this works to a certain extent in films like Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer, he is so out of place in Grown Ups that he could have been cut out entirely and nothing would have changed. We first see him with the antagonists when he agrees to ride on a zip line upside down. He crashes into a building and spends the rest of the movie in a body cast that requires his arms to be up the entire time. When he shows up again, he’s made fun of for this and then mistakenly touches Deanne’s (Maya Rudolph) breast when he was trying to touch her pregnant belly. He then falls back into the crowd. Now, not apologizing for unintentionally groping her was wrong, but what did he do before that to receive such ridicule and physical punishment during the rest of the movie? It’s all so pointless.
1 Being Everything
Aside from the jokes that don’t work and the formulaic plot, the biggest problem with Grown Ups is it’s trying to be too many things at once. It could have been a raucous comedy about grown men trying to recapture their childhood glory days. Maybe the focus should have been on married couples spending time together by a lake and learning to reconnect. Then again, it could have been about a guy from Hollywood trying to teach his kids to appreciate the moment and help them learn to be more grounded and respectful. Instead, it chose to be all those things at once, meaning it can’t be one good movie because it’s too busy being several mediocre ones.
