DIR: Dennis Dugan • WRI: Steve Koren, Adam Sandler • PRO: Todd Garner, Jack Giarraputo • DOP: Dean Cundey • ED: Tom Costain • DES: Perry Andelin Blake • Cast: Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes
It’s not exactly the worst job in the world, being a film reviewer. But sometimes it can feel a little bit like torture. There’s different types of bad movies; there’s the kind of movie you knew nothing about beforehand so you had no idea how bad it was going to be, then there’s the kind of movie you had high expectations for and they disappoint, and then there’s the kind of movie that you know already is going to be awful and you can see it coming at you like a car in the night and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it and no matter how bad you think it’s going to be it still somehow manages to be even worse than that. Jack & Jill is that kind of movie.
Jack (Adam Sandler) is happily married Erin (Katie Holmes) and he has lovely kids and he has a great job and everything in his life is perfect. Except that every Thanksgiving his twin sister Jill (also Adam Sandler) comes to visit, and this year she’s planning on staying for quite a bit longer than usual… Also, one of Jack’s potential clients, Al Pacino (playing a version of himself that would him to be in a cross-dressing Adam Sandler movie) takes a shining to Jill and…
You know what? No. Just no. Don’t see this movie. It’s beyond reviewing. Every once great comedian seems to ruin himself with family comedies (Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy have done it before him), and the nadir is usually the cross-dressing/fat-suit movie, and then hopefully the actor will see the errors of his way and try to pick better projects to be in. Sandler has shown he can act before in Punch Drunk Love, and more recently seemed to send up his own career in Funny People, so there was hope that he was on the road to recovery. But a quick look at his upcoming projects show that he’s currently working on Grown Ups 2 and a movie version of the boardgame CandyLand. There is no hope for Sandler. Let’s just rewatch Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer and remember him fondly the way he used to be.
Rory Cashin
Rated PG (see IFCO website for details)
Jack and Jill is released on 3rd February 2012
