DVD review: Grown ups

A group of “grownups” revisits their childhood places when their basketball coach dies.

First let the elephant in the room. I like Adam Sandler, I’m actually a fan of his works, and I normally watch every single comedy that he does. I know that he always plays the same character, the patented Adam Sandler role, but I don’t really care because it’s a very broad one, more like a platform to tell jokes from than anything else.

Having said that “Grownups” is really the lowest point in his filmograpy and considering that it’s coming from the same team that made the underrated “You don’t mess with the Zohan” is really a shame.

First of all Sandler, who is also on writing duties here, is starting to think that he don’t really need any driving force in his plots. Here we have a group of estranged grownups who meet again after many years, a sort of high school reunion, and that’s all. There is no real antagonist, our heroes are all so very very successful that any sense of urgency, any reason we should care about all these spoiled guys, is missing.

Now I understand that we don’t really watch an Adam Sandler movie for the plot but in reality we still need one. To use a metaphor the plot of a comedy is like a skeleton whereupon we can affix the various jokes, with no plot all we got is standup comedy, very funny of course but after half an hour it can get tiring.

This gets us to the jokes and I must sadly report that Adam Sandler made his first mostly unfunny movie. We could feel the lack of inspiration in how he started resorting to that very gross, cringe inducing stuff that is all the rage right now.

His entire extended circle of cinematic friends, Kevin James, Rob Schneider and co, appears in one form or the other. Actually it all felt like watching an extended trip of an old group of friends where every now and then they remembered to turn on the camera.

Unfunny and gross, stay away from this one.