Grown Ups 2 Review

Grown Ups 2 Review: A tone-dead, thematically vague film with nothing to say. Adults Gone Juvenile.

Rating: *
Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups 2, the sequel to 2010 buddy comedy film Grown Ups, is a tone-dead, thematically vague film whose scattershot efforts at making a grand statement utimately fails in delivering any coherent message to its audience. His film (Sandler’s one of the co-writers) tries to be Altmanesque in a way, by introducing an assortment of peculiar characters, like a married woman who’s obsessed with Sandler since high-school because he had replied to a letter she’d written to him or her sourpuss husband who works as a driving test examiner, who ramble through disconnected scenes without moving the actual plot forward, except that it has no vision and no sense of direction. There’s a line in the film

mouthed by none-other-than Sandler himself: ‘I don’t not have any conversation working out for me’. The PERFECT way to describe this film.

 
At moments, Grown Ups 2 reminded me of the cult Tommy Wiseau film The Room. There’s even a party scene towards the climax that’s as absurd as the one in The Room. But unlike the disastrous latter, there’s no random ‘I have breast Cancer!’ line to surprise you. Even an unintentionally funny moment would’ve made this film a hit among cult audiences. There’s none.

 
The theatre hall was quieter than a meditation room at an ashram, and that’s never a good sign for a comedy. The situation at times was so bad I think even a laugh track wouldn’t have salvaged the moments. But I do advice Sandler to stick to television stand-up comedy or try his hand at sitcom. The hugely popular Big Bang Theory, as proven by Youtube videos, was awfully unfunny without a laugh track. This device performs the psychological function of drawing out laughter from audiences, and I think Sandler’s kind of comedy desperately needs it. The great critic Pauline Kael once commented, about the role of critics, that ‘My job is to show him which way to go’. Mr. Sandler, I think it’s time to give up movies for good and go TV.

 
The problem with Sandler’s sense of humor is that its often quite derogatory and unpleasing, and usually targets kids and people with deformities or disabilities. His earlier film with Jennifer Aniston called ‘Just Go With It’ had him dump a young girl into a mount of dung or mud without bothering to pick her up after. He may think its funny, but I found him to be a massive jerk. Grown Ups 2 has a number of jerkish, jackass moments coming not just from Sandler but also from co-stars Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade.

 
Sandler repeatedly calls his eldest son ‘fugly’ and tells him the only way he can get a girl is by following Sandler’s three-step rules of flirting. There’s more than one scene in which Chris Rock’s character bullies the kid who wants to date his daughter. The ladies, Salma Hayek and Maya Rudolph, also indulge in mean-spirited playground bullying. There’s a muscular transsexual female who’s taunted publicly on multiple occasions for her manly physique. The lady with a permanent crush on Sandler, who may potentially be suffering from a psychological condition, is kicked hard in the face by Hayek at the end. And these people are later shown to be role-models for anti-bullying. Worse hypocrites than Miley Cyrus, aren’t they?

 
There people aren’t good natured enough for their gags to strike as funny. Their humour either offends or simply fizzles. A Big Bang Theory clip without laugh-tracks was called ‘A disturbing documentary about the lives of four sociopaths’ by one guy on Youtube, and I think the same goes for these guys – their humour simply cannot work without a laugh track. The tone of his film remains vague throughout. The film includes gross-out humour, with a reindeer peeing on Sandler’s face in the beginning of the film and characters puking like the Exorcist-girl on two different occasions. Then there’s an absurd angle involving Taylor Lautner and his bunch of young-adults picking on Sandler’s gang because they’re on the group’s ‘turf’.

 
Then there are the parent-child ‘inspiring moments’ where the child reveals a hidden talent or overcomes a weakness, like when Kevin James’ character finds out his child is a musical prodigy, or when Sandler’s younger son excels at rugby. But the same film includes multiple close up shots of ladies’ boobs and asses and ogling men. Every succeeding sequence ends up seeming out of sync with the previous one. And the ‘character development’ the film indicates at the end seems so insincere, it basically looked like a ploy to make the film seem ‘family-friendly’.

 
The plot is negligible and hard to find, so I’ll just put whatever’s written on Wikipedia: ‘Three years after the events of Grown Ups, Lenny Feder (Sandler) has relocated his family back to Connecticut where he and his friends, Eric Lamonsoff (James), Kurt McKenzie (Chris Rock) and Marcus Higgins (Chris Rock) grew up. This time around, the grown ups are the ones learning lessons from their kids on a day notoriously full of surprises, the last day of school. In the beginning, all of them still think that their children are still kids, however throughout the film they begin to accept that their children are growing up’.

 
I LOLed hard at ‘full of surprises’. And if this suggests that the children have grown up, then it should add that the adults themselves have all grown down. They’ve become puerile. And director Dennis Dugan, whose track record dropped hard after Grown Ups, with his last film Jack and Jill winning the most number of Razzie Awards for any film (a dishonourable ten), should ‘grow up’ and find out his hidden talents. Because ‘film-making’ at least doesn’t seem like one of them.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!