Nov 08, 2013
The first five minutes of the film sees a deer sneak its way into the Feder's house and proceed to pee in everybody's mouth when they scare him. When a film starts like this, you know that there's nowhere to go but down. I wouldn't ever say that I liked the first Grown Ups, not even close, but I didn't hate it either. From what I was expecting, it could have been far worse than it ended up being. The fact of the matter is that I think the cast had a lot to do with that, they seemed to have fun and that can rub off at times. This movie, however, is just as bad as you can imagine. Maybe even a little worse than that. But, much like the first film, the cast seemed to be having a lot of fun. This time, though, it didn't really rub off on me as much as it repelled me from ever watching a Sandler movie again. Take any random Sandler movie, the ones that his company have produced, and this film is almost like a Greatest Hits version of that. Random and juvenile sketches are the law of the jungle in this movie. The movie is really a series of skits without any real sense of direction or progression. The moments between the sketches themselves are painful to watch, as they show the characters laughing at the stuff they just did, almost like the film equivalent of canned laughter so as to make unfunny jokes funny. You know shit's bad when the actors themselves are literally begging for laughs. Not that I think they had much trouble getting laughs, as this is the type of film that applies to the lowest-common denominator. Can Adam Sandler really get a screenwriting credit for his "work" in this movie? It's like he took a bunch of random sketches he couldn't fit into any of his other movies and threw it on here and had to come up with SOMETHING to tie all these sketches together, so he called up his buddies and told them to come down to shoot a sequel to Grown Ups. I can't imagine the actual process being much more different than that. It's the laziest film I think Sandler has done yet. And you know what, in a career or phoning it in with the laziest attempts at puerile humor, that's really saying something that this is his laziest film yet. At least Jack and Jill had Al Pacino being a madman, but I don't think this film has any real redeeming qualities whatsoever. There's a few decent one-liners, but that's not really gonna improve a film that much. In fact, it doesn't improve the film at all. I just don't know what they were thinking when they decided to make this movie. I know what Sandler was thinking, at least he got some of his buddies, who wouldn't even get work in films if they weren't friends with Sandler, a paycheck. And this is more the supporting cast. And you know what, I'm glad he's loyal to his friends, that's an admirable trait for a human to have, but when you showcase them in movies like these, then there's no real way for these people to get any decent work elsewhere because your stank is all over them. I'm surprised Steve Buscemi has come out of it relatively unscathed, because he's been in Sandler movies for over a decade now and he's in one of the most critically acclaimed shows on TV, Boardwalk Empire. I love how he tries to instill strong family values in a movie that's full of bullying, homophobia, sexism, etc. It's just grand to see, almost as if he forgot that movies are supposed to tell stories and he figured it out more than 85% into the movie. As you can see, this movie is just horrendous. A poor excuse for a film, if you can even call it that. Sandler just took a bunch of childish sketches he had left from other films and he just went off and filmed them with his friends. Ironically enough, considering the film's humor, it was harder for me to take a piss than it was to "write" and "make" this movie. Just an awful experience all around.
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