Who's In It: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Brooklyn Decker, Bailee Madison, Nick Swardson, Dave Matthews
The Basics: Sandler is a plastic surgeon who pretends to be married so that the women he meets won't get attached to him. This backfires when he meets a woman he falls for (former model Brooklyn Decker), so he bribes his assistant (Aniston) and her children into playing along as his fake soon-to-be ex-wife and estranged kids. For some reason Nick Swardson is also along for the ride as a German sheep rancher. So is Nicole Kidman ("Look, everyone! I'm a good sport about Botox!") So is Dave Matthews, who, in the film's emotional climax, picks up a coconut off the ground with his buttcheeks.
What's The Deal: You know you've seen something truly damaging when your head keeps spinning with flashes of Pizza Hut and Pepsi product placement, Heidi Montag cameos, fake "serious" sentimentality and tender soliloquies about the gleaming sunburst that is Jennifer Aniston's smile, insultingly inept and childlike behavior on the part of every single non-white and/or non-heterosexual person to get screen time, scenes that might have originally scripted but that play out on camera in a bizarrely stumbling improvisational way until all the go-nowhere dialogue just trails off and there's a second of silence before Sandler says, "Well... anyway..." It's the kind of movie that makes you wonder why anyone decided it was good enough to show to the public, the kind that makes you want to repeatedly hit yourself in the face with a hammer. You'd have more fun doing that, too.
Give Me Cheap Vulgarity Or Give Me Death: If you take away the random anomalies of Sandler's film career (Reign Over Me, Punch Drunk Love, Funny People) you're left with early idiot Sandler and current sometimes-idiot-sometimes-boring Sandler. It's as though he can't
can't decide if he wants to make movies about poop and scrotum-crushing accidents or if he wants to make movies where he's a convincing romantic lead. I'd like it better if he stuck with full-tilt idiot. Because believe it or not, this whole thing only comes alive when children are being shoved face-first into mud and/or defecating on Nick Swardson's hand, when Sandler is getting smashed in the balls or pushing Aniston to the floor, when lopsided boob-implant ladies walk into a scene, sheep are being wrestled or Nicole Kidman is extolling the virtues of Dave Matthews's "taffy nipples." That's the only reliable Adam Sandler bus to ride on. He should just stick to driving it.
Sting + Sting + More Sting = STING! Someone in charge of this movie loved Sting so much that they turned every spare moment without dialogue into a kind of aural fan-fictiony tribute to him. Vintage Police songs, Sting's tantric solo mewlings, even Sting-based mash-ups and remixes of hip hop songs. It's wall-to-wall Sting. Sure hope you love Sting a lot, too, or you're doomed to 116 minutes of the soundtrack to male menopause.
Regarding Jennifer: She's got next to nothing to do except show off her rockin' 40 year-old bikini bod. It's a plot point.