Big
Daddy
Rated PG-13
Now showing
At a recent panel discussion in Los Angeles featuring comedy
screenwriters, writer-director Albert Brooks (Lost in America,
Modern Romance) summed up the discouraging Adam Sandler
phenomenon, offering possible solution: "Audiences only know
what they're given. If you get up on the stage and do an hour
and a half of fart jokes, people laugh and they go home...but
if you did 20 minutes of, I don't know, talking about God,
then maybe the fart jokes in 10 years won't go over as well."
Brooks obviously hadn't had the chance to catch a preview
of the latest Sandler vehicle, Big Daddy. If there's
one thing worse than Sandler's lowest-common-denominator
brand of frat-boy humor, it's Sandler trying to take on
serious subject matter. His latest tries an image makeover
by partly replacing the infantile stupidity of movies like
The Waterboy, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore
with "important" life-lesson themes of parental responsibility,
love and acceptance. Bad move. Big Daddy's level
of shameless emotional manipulation makes The Wedding
Singer feel subtle, but the movie still centers on Sandler's
tired, tedious shtick. In terms of lame comedy, papa's got
the same old bag.
Protagonist Sonny Koufax is another in a long line of slacker
Sandler idiots. He's a Manhattanite who works one day a
week as a tollbooth attendant but lives comfortably, having
scored $200,000 from a car accident. The rest of his time
is spent watching cartoons or sports, or sleeping. Due to
a series of crazy events too banal to relate, Koufax ends
up taking care of an abandoned kid while social services
tries to find him a foster home. Over the course of numerous
montage sequences, Sonny bonds with the twerp, and he decides
that he must find a way to keep his pseudo-son.
Of course, none of these details really matters. It's all
about Adam. How this man became a comic superstar boggles
the mind. Like a juvenile class clown seeking attention,
he'll do anything for a laugh. His one-note bag of tricks
includes screaming, mumbling like a moron, breaking from
character (is there a cheaper form of humor than laughing
at your own jokes?) and loads of crude scatological humor,
usually involving bodily fluids--here we get gallons of
piss, vomit and spit. There's nothing wrong with crude bathroom
humor, as the Farrelly Brothers have shown with such films
as Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About
Mary. The difference is that the Farrellys are both
gross and clever. They push the PC envelope right
off the table but at the same time comment on this slap-dick
comic approach. Sandler, on the other hand, offers nothing
new. He's just a dumbed-down Jerry Lewis/Mel Brooks retread.
While Sandler's comic approach already feels rehashed and
stale, what's most excruciating is the script's insistence
on repeating the same jokes over and over again. Big
Daddy returns to the well so often that it needs a conveyor
belt. For example, when the kid wets the bed, Sonny mends
the situation by placing newspaper over the accident. OK,
now that's kind of funny and indicative of the way he temporarily
solves all of life's problems. But when Sonny does it three
more times, the joke's not only worn but also insulting
to its audience. Do the writers really give us that little
credit? How funny would the cum-in-the-hair sequence in
There's Something About Mary have been if the Farrellys
regurgitated it three times? This is just one of many examples
of repetition ad nauseam. There's a running gag with
the kid publicly pissing on walls and another involving
sticks being tossed out in front of rollerbladers. (When
people fall down and go boom, that's comedy!) You want stereotype
jokes? Big Daddy's got 'em in spades. We got Rob
Schneider as a wacky foreign delivery guy who can't read
(apparently Peter Stormare wasn't available and Schneider
needed some SNL charity work). Allen Covert and Peter
Dante play gay lawyers whose open-mouthed displays of public
affection are apparently very funny to the filmmakers
(and were scandalous to the Tigard preview audience).
And then there's that kid. The minute Julian (Cole and
Dylan Sprouse) shows up on Sandler's doorstep wearing an
adorable blue hat, blue eyes watering and mouth agape, we
know we're in trouble. Here we have not one but two more
child actors suffering from terminally cute disease. Hell,
they've even got a precious speech impediment for added
"awww" value.
Julian is a perfect match for Sonny. Both brats act the
same age. Still, the relationship between the pair isn't
so much sweet and genuine as it is a device for Sandler's
skit mentality. The kid is basically Sandler's ad-lib springboard--he
plays the straight man to Sandler's dim-witted clown. This
self-absorbed technique extends to every other relationship
in the film. Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) plays
the undeveloped love interest, Layla, but she's given little
else to do but stand there, giggle at Sandler's stand-up
routine and eternally smile as if she's had an overdose
of nitrous oxide.
Both of these relationships pull Big Daddy toward
its maudlin downfall. The drama is as shameless as Sandler's
brand of comedy--full-blown mawkish sentimentality that
will have you reaching for a barf bag rather than your tissue
box. It's a mechanical, contrived message movie completely
devoid of irony. Sandler may be trying to change his idiotic
image, but he forgets that the only moments when he's funny
are those in which nothing is taken seriously. As it stands,
the film's biggest laugh may be the moment when the comedian
tries acting and cries. You don't buy this "authentic" moment
for a minute, and when he turns his back to the camera,
you can almost feel him laughing at those in the audience
who do.
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Willamette Week | originally
published June 30, 1999
|
