Adam Sandler is one of a growing number of comedians who's not content to just wait for projects to come his way. He's set up his own production company "Happy Madison" to produce his own films as well as those of fellow comedians like Rob Schneider (
Deuce Bigelow, The Hot Chick ) and David Spade (
Joe Dirt, Dickie Roberts ). The trajectory that Sandler seems to be plotting for his career is to go from nerd (
The Waterboy ) to leading man (
The Longest Yard and now
Click ).
In Click , Sandler plays Michael Newman, a workaholic architect in a big firm run by the womanizing Mr. Ammer (David Hasselhoff spoofing himself). Michael desperately wants to make partner but Mr. Ammer never appreciates all the hours he puts in and the way he's been made to backburner his family life. And he's got a great family that deserves a little of his quality time. His beautiful wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale in a role that?s merely window dressing as she prances around in skimpy jammies) is supportive, and he has two great kids in Ben (Joseph Castanon) and Samantha (Tatum McCann). He also has loving parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner who are almost as good a parental pairing as Paul Sand and Julie Hagerty were in Adam and Steve ).
Unable to control his life or even his television, Michael heads out one night to pick up a universal remote. But the only store that?s open is Bed, Bath and Beyond (I wonder what kind of product placement bucks you get for that kind of mention). He passes through the bed and bath part, and goes straight to the Beyond where he meets Morty (Christopher Walken), a tech nerd who gives him a very special universal remote. When Michael gets home he soon finds that the remote not only controls the TV but lets him adjust the volume on the dog, fast forward through tedious foreplay with his wife, and pause events as they?re happening. But as one might expect, this nifty little device proves to be a double-edged sword. Michael can fast through colds, boring family meals and long hours of work in order to skip ahead to a big promotion but he?s also missing out on his kids growing up and quality time at home.
Click is, or at least wants to be, a comedy with a moral lesson. But it resorts to a predictable end twist to allow its character to learn the difference between right and wrong without really having to pay a price for it. Click gets some comic mileage out of its premise in the early goings, and Christopher Walken, even in a throwaway role like Morty, is still fun to watch. But unfortunately, the audience doesn?t have a remote with which to fast forward through Click' s dull spots and forced weepy moments.
Co-screenwriter and producer Steve Koren says the idea for the film came up when he got in an argument with his girlfriend and grabbed the remote, pointed it at her and hit the MUTE button. It didn?t work but a light bulb went off in Koren?s head and he thought, "Wow, what if your remote could work that way?" I guess he never saw Being There in which the mentally challenged Peter Sellers character also attempts to use a remote to ?change channels? when some unpleasant people cross his path.
But then Koren, co-writer Mark O'Keefe and director Frank Coraci end up borrowing quite a bit from other sources. From It's a Wonderful Life they take the idea of showing two ways a life could play out. From Bedazzled they take the idea of a devilish fellow (Peter Cook in Bedazzled and Walken in Click) who offers the main character a supernatural means of altering his life to try and quickly get what he wants. Then there is the assortment of lowbrow jokes that feel all too familiar.
The problem with Click is that it?s a one-gag movie and the one gag just ain't that funny. The comedy derived from Michael?s magical remote is predictable "volume control, fast-forwarding, changing languages" but never clever or surprising. Plus the film tries to mine comedy from tired racial and sexual stereotypes that are just not funny and seem badly out of date. We get lame stereotypes of Arab princes, Japanese businessmen, gays and bimbo blondes?hasn?t comedy moved beyond this? Plus the filmmakers want to be able to make fart and other bodily function jokes like a low-brow comedy does but then they also want to wretch tearful emotions from the story in the final reel. It?s not that the two things are necessarily mutually exclusive but it takes a skilled hand to weave them together and no one in this film is quite that gifted. If you want to make an audience feel for comic characters, then at the very least you have to develop them to a point where they feel as real as they are funny.
As for the more fanciful aspects of Click , the filmmakers play fast and loose with their fantasy logic and let the film veer off on plot tangents that make no sense (unless you fall back to the lame defense of it's a fantasy, anything?s possible?). There?s a whole segment of the script that has Sandler and his son as grossly overweight, and that only seems to happen because the filmmakers thought a fat suit would be funny.
As for Sandler, he can be a likable goof and he's even palatable as a comic action antihero as in The Longest Yard , but he's not convincing as a loving husband and father. It seems odd that comedians such as Sandler and Eddie Murphy, who both did riskier material on Saturday Night Live or on the stand up circuit, have suddenly turned so safe and conservative as they make "family" comedies and stand up for family values.
Click (rated PG-13 for language, crude humor and some drug references) wants to play with its character's life and with the narrative structure in a manner akin to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . But Click has nowhere near the inventiveness, vision and emotional depth of that film. So, my advice: wait for Click to come out on DVD, then you can use your remote to just fast forward through this simplistic and only occasionally funny fantasy.
Companion viewing: It's a Wonderful Life, Bedazzled (the one with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore), Being There. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -----
