Click Movie Review

Click

Directed by: Frank Coraci

Starring: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken

Rated: PG-13 for language, crude and sex-related humor, and some drug references.

107 minutes

DVD

I hate to start a review with a question, well, actually that’s not true, I don’t mind at all… anyway, in this case I have to ask… did anyone else see this movie and immediately say “WTF? I thought this was supposed to be FUNNY!?”

If you did, take happiness in the fact that you are not alone. In fact everyone that I’ve talked to in the flesh who has seen this flick said the same thing, although most of them, considerably less vulgar than I, left out the WTF part.

In case you haven’t seen Click yet, and plan to, let me be the first to give you the warning. This is not a “typical” Adam Sandler flick. Yes, you have your juvenile humor moments, dogs humping stuffed animals, Adam in a really, really fat suit, some parts where people hit/fall/strike in the balls/etc…. you know what I mean. But all in all, I would have to say that this is more of a drama than a comedy, perhaps what is labeled a dramady, and a “lesson-teaching” dramady at that.

Lesson? Don’t rush through life. Stop and smell the roses. Family is more important than money. If you don’t appreciate your life and family, you’ll end up a lonely old man, dying in the rain.

Oops, that could be a spoiler. Ok, you know there’s always spoilers.

I like Adam Sandler playing serious, don’t get me wrong. Spanglish was one of my all-time favs. It established Sandler, at least in my mind, as a versatile actor who could handle a heavy role with the same ease as a slapstick knock-em-down. Yet this time, I wasn’t expecting heavy, probing, soul-searching… I was expecting Happy Gilmore, and laughing til I cried, not choking back tears that were manipulated out of me by the damn filmmakers. Sorry if I sound bitter. It’s just that I am. Or was. By now, I’ve had time to settle down and stop feeling so used.

Sandler plays Michael Newman, an architect on the fast track to success, constantly choosing work over family. His hot wife and two adorable children are quite understanding, but you can see, right away, the central theme for the movie. One day, he’s going to wish he’d picked the other way.

On a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond (isn’t that an awesome store, by the way? Where else can you get high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets for a hundred bucks or less?) Michael goes through a door marked something like, ‘Way, Way Beyond” and runs into Walken, a mad-scientist type who introduces him to the Universal Remote Control. Now from the previews we already know what it does. He can pause time, to move the baseball mitt of his son's bratty friend away from his face, thus resulting in ball hitting the bratty face. He can slow down a female jogger going by to better appreciate her bouncing, generous assets. He can fast-forward through arguments with the wifey, leaving him basking in the afterglow of “making up”, without ever having to do the heavy lifting of arguing. All good ingredients for a comedy.

It gets serious fast. See the problem with the Universal remote (and of course we knew there would be one) is that it starts to take over. Walken explains that it is adjusting itself to Michael, making choices for him based on his past behavior. This means, for example, that he cannot enjoy leisurely lovemaking, because it’s programmed now to rush right through the foreplay and get to the good stuff. This is a drawback Mr. Newman didn’t count on and he tries to avoid doing his “regular” things, (which adds some funny scenes, such as him going to work in his bathrobe to sidestep the regular routine of dressing) but to no avail. Time slips out from under him and he starts waking up with gaps of years behind him, where he was on “auto-pilot” and actually remembers nothing. Has experienced nothing. You see what page they’re leading you to read, right?

At one point, Michael wakes up enormously obese, his children grown, his wife remarried. Yet his job is better than ever… he has advanced to the position he always dreamed of. Another slip-n-slide and he wakes in the hospital, after having a huge tumor removed. His ex is visiting him (and of course he loves her, to him she’s his wife, not ex-wife) and he has had several stomach-reducing operations. He “flaps” his belly skin incessantly at her. This was one of the “funny” moments, but by this time, the moments aren’t funny anymore, because every viewer is imagining how they would feel in such a stupid, sucky situation. In each of his stops through the race-of-his-life, there’s a new family dog, humping the same stuffed duck-and that’s what all the humorous moments start to feel like. Heh heh….yeah, that was funny, the first time.

Before we know it, Michaels’ fast-forwarded right through his entire life and is full of the obvious regret and heartbreak. I won’t tell you how it ends, because I’m going to leave at least that bit unspoiled, but trust me when I say it’s totally predictable and you can GUESS how it ends if you put forth any amount of effort toward wondering. I was also completely disgusted that a movie, an Adam Sandler movie, was going for the cheap emotional route, sending in scenes of such heartbreak and sorrow that you’d have to be a stone to not feel something, anything, even if you didn’t cry like a lil baby. I don’t mind my emotions being manipulated during a film, as long as the film is up front in the previews that it’s going to do just that!

I wish they hadn’t packaged this, preview-wise, as a comedy. I wish they hadn’t tried to make it into a weird hybrid of comedy and drama, because it just didn’t work. I wish I had known, before I started watching it, that it was going to be just another movie in the A Christmas Carol tradition, scrooge morphing into a decent guy because he sees how screwed his life has been.

If you want dramady with humor sprinkled sparsely throughout, sure, go ahead and rent it. But if you want a Sandler Special, funny-so-funny with a wee touch of feelings, then save your dollars or spend them on Big Daddy.

I give it 3 &s...

& I happen to believe the moral of the story is true…I just didn’t want to find it here.

& the fat suit part was grotesquely hilarious

& David Hasslehoff plays his boss in the perfectly slick Hoff way.