Predictable comics are all groan up
Sandler and Co. deliver what their fans expect — breasts, breaking wind and boys being boys
In the opening scene of Adam Sandler’s new comedy, Grown Ups 2, a deer breaks into the suburban house of Lenny ( Sandler) while he’s in bed with his wife Roxanne, played by Salma Hayek. The deer is a persuasive special effect that unleashes an authentic- looking stream of pee into Sandler’s face.
Two things are of special interest here. The first is that while Grown Ups 2 is 101 minutes of juvenile slapstick and fart jokes, you have to give Sandler credit when it comes to casting himself a movie wife.
The other is that the pee joke occasioned the first of many roars of laughter from a preview crowd that was primed for exactly this sort of thing. By the time that Eric, the character played by Kevin James — a member of Sandler’s stock company of B- list comics — demonstrates his signature move, which is an ability to burp, sneeze and fart at the same time, the theatre was pretty much limp with appreciation.
Sandler knows his audience, and Grown Ups 2 is right down the middle of the plate for anyone who wants to see fat men drenched in paint or busty women jiggling their chests while middle- aged husbands look on with comic, slack- jawed amazement.
The film is a series of such moments, strung together with a plot that staggers along happily and incoherently over depictions of projectile vomiting, bug- eyed double takes and blows to the crotch.
It’s hardly five minutes old before Sandler — playing Lenny, a Hollywood type who has moved his family back to his old hometown to be near his friends — says, “Thank God there’s no crazy people out here.” That’s the cue for a school bus to bump into view, driven by crazy Nick ( Nick Swardson), who says his wife has just left him because “she found me eating a banana … with my butt.” With that we’re off to the races, and the movie hardly pauses to catch its breath.
As for the plot, an especially lazy construction, Nick’s wife wants to have a fourth child and Nick is against it, although you can be sure that by the end — after the burp- sneeze- farts have faded into gauzy memory — he’ll be delivering softhearted tributes to fatherhood and family to his wife’s stomach. It’s all about family, really. Family and intestinal gas.
Meanwhile, Eric ( James) is married to Maria Bello — another instance of the fantasy casting that Hollywood affords our more successful comedians — but spends a lot of time watching soap operas with his mother ( Georgia Engel).
Marcus ( David Spade) has just learned he has a son ( Alexander Ludwig), a giant thug who carries a knife, but who softens in the face of dad’s apologies. Kurt ( Chris Rock) is married to Maya Rudolph, and their problem is that their daughter is about to go out on her first date.
We’ve met most of them before, in the first Grown Ups, and while Sandler regular Rob Schneider is missing from the group — a tiny mercy, but one takes what one can get — he has stocked the pool with an impressive list of over- the- hill cameos, including Shaquille O’Neal as a big cop whose thing is that he’s big, Jon Lovitz as a cleaner who likes to watch bosoms jiggle ( breasts vie with flatulence in the Sandler canon), and Taylor Lautner as the leader of a gang of fraternity boys who force our heroes to jump naked off a cliff at the local swimming hole.
That development is part of the film’s mild homophobia — a guy in skimpy gym shorts, almost showing his stuff, is the film’s sine qua non of horror — but it’s all in good fun. Well, bad fun really, but well meant: there’s an undeniable camaraderie among Sandler and his buddies. He has aged from a whiny boy- man into a more avuncular boy- man, and they’re all making the jokes that amuse them: life rafts that inflate in the store, knocking over shelves, or guys getting trapped in tires that roll through town, causing traffic accidents.
In the end, though, all is forgiven and love reigns supreme. It’s gruesome.