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who might be up for a threesome, Murray senses a business opportunity. He’ll manage the business side of things, while Fioravante handles, er… everything else.
Allen is on terrific form. But what makes the film is the quality of the supporting cast, a touching romantic plot, and the cleverness of Turturro’s writing. For Fioravante turns out to be the sort of man who knows what women of a certain age want. He dances sweetly with some, massages others and some … well, he does what a gigolo is supposed to.
Sofia Vergara is very funny and sexy; Sharon Stone is so good you wonder why she doesn’t work more; and, in the film’s more serious sub-plot, Vanessa Paradis is immensely touching as the young Orthodox Jewish widow trapped by both her faith and her grief.
As an actor, Turturro plays with winning understatement but as a writer/director he does eventually succumb to over-elaboration, sending us off with a slight disappointment but with happy memories of an unforgettable mid-life threesome.
Nobody brings out the good side of Adam Sandler better than Drew Barrymore but, given that it’s 10 years since 50 First Dates and 16 since The Wedding Singer, she’s clearly reluctant to do it too often. For a painful 30 minutes or so in Blended, you can see why, because it is laboured and charmless.
It’s painfully slow too, seemingly taking an age for widowed Jim (Sandler) and divorced Lauren (Barrymore) to meet up.
When they do, they take an instant dislike to each other and then, when a bargainprice holiday in South Africa suddenly becomes available, decide they will head off with their children to a resort hotel holding a special week for that divorce-age phenomenon, the ‘blended’ family: step-parents, step-children and so on.
But Jim and his two girls and Lauren and her two boys aren’t a blended family; they’re just sharing a suite of rooms to save money. Aren’t they? Just when I was sitting there grumpily, something made me laugh, a corner was turned and suddenly the film was hitting more targets than it was missing.
This picture is still a broad commercial comedy, but Sandler and Barrymore still have something together.