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Apparently, Adam Sandler and his old Saturday Night Live buddies have grown up. They have wives and kids and mortgages and weight problems. And that must mean that their days of ogling hot chicks and giggling at fart jokes are behind them, right? Don’t count on it—because Sandler and his pals may joke about getting old and fat, but there isn’t anything particularly grown-up about the comedy in Grown Ups.
Sandler stars as Lenny Feder, a successful Hollywood agent who’s got it all: a fabulous house, a gorgeous fashion designer wife (Salma Hayek), and a couple of spoiled rotten sons who spend their days doing nothing but playing video games and texting demands to their nanny. So when Lenny’s beloved basketball coach dies, he sees it as the perfect opportunity to put their trip to Milan Fashion Week on hold and travel back east to reconnect with old friends while spending some time in the great outdoors.
The Feders end up sharing a lake house for the weekend with Lenny’s four childhood friends and their families. Kurt (Chris Rock) is now a hen-pecked stay-at-home dad. Rob (Rob Schneider) has a bad toupee and a wife who’s old enough to be his mother. Eric (Kevin James) is fat and dull, and his wife, Sally (Maria Bello), is still breast-feeding their four-year-old son. And Marcus (David Spade) is still a confirmed bachelor and party animal.
Now, I know that there’s supposed to be some sort of plot here—but, for the life of me, I can’t tell you what it is. There’s something about a 30-year-old basketball rivalry, and there’s something about Lenny wanting his kids to act like normal kids. But none of that really counts as a central plotline. Instead, it seems like the whole idea was to round up a bunch of former SNL cast members (along with Sandler’s various old-faithfuls—and Kevin James), put them together in a big cabin on a lake for a few days, roll the cameras, and see what happens. Unfortunately, what happens doesn’t have any kind of direction. It isn’t all that interesting—nor is it especially funny. It’s just an endless stream of the same old repetitive insults: Eric is fat, Rob’s wife is old, Lenny’s rich and pampered, Kurt’s a pansy, and his domineering mother-in-law (Ebony Jo-Ann) has bunions and gas.
In the few moments when the guys aren’t flinging half-assed insults at each other or generally acting like overgrown 12-year-olds, it becomes painfully obvious that there’s no real point to this random, scatterbrained mess. Without the ensemble cast of big-name comics, it probably would have been (and should have been) released back in January, with the rest of the year’s comically-challenged comedies.
I can’t really blame Sandler and his friends for wanting to get paid to hang out together at the lake—and it’s clear that they had a whole lot of fun at their little reunion. I just wish it was half as much fun to watch as it was to film.
