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The Do-Over
Adam Sandler and David Spade unite for an overblown comic adventure called The Do-Over, which does provide sporadic laughs, but the often logic defying story does prove that Sandler and Spade are a little long in the tooth for these kind of cinema hi-jinks.
The 2016 comedy stars Adam Sandler as Max, a coroner pretending to be an FBI agent, who runs into his high school BFF, Charlie (Spade) at their high school reunion. Charlie works as the manager of a bank inside a supermarket, still drives the same car he drove in high school, is married to a cheating whore and is constantly disrespected by his obnoxious twin stepsons. Seeing how miserable Charlie is and tired of denying his own misery, Max steals Charlie away for a weekend of partying, during which Max reveals to Charlie that he has faked their deaths and that they have now assumed the identities of two corpses that Max encountered named Richard and Butch. A chance to start over is initially quite thrilling for our boys until it is revealed that the men whose lives they have decided to steal are still in some very serious trouble with some very dangerous people.
Steven Brill, who directed one of my favorite Adam Sandler comedies, Mr. Deeds, has mounted a highly improbable and very expensive action comedy that doesn't go anywhere the viewer expects it to. We are initially pleasantly diverted by the guys' discovery of a key on (or should I say Inside) one of the corpses leads to an obscene amount of money and a lavish hideaway in Puerto Rico and the film initially might make anyone who is unhappy with their life that the solution is faking their death. Of course, the guys learn they're in danger and the thrill is gone, but what was hard to swallow was the eventual relationship between the two dead men and what they were working on at the time they were murdered.
Brill works very hard at making sense out of the hard to believe screenplay and provides plenty of opportunities for the stars to provide the kind of laughs that were accustomed to from them, but a lot of the elaborate physical comedy that populates this film is just beyond the stars' capabilities. A lot of it seems to have been inserted as a method of disguising some of the gaping holes in the screenplay that make up for some pretty sluggish moments in the second act, though it does bounce back for a pretty credible finale...I absolutely loved the finale physical confrontation between two female characters, filmed entirely in slow motion and set to the track of Madonna's "Crazy for You." An initially jarring image that just got funnier as it progressed and the stars just stood there and watched them.
Sandler is no stranger to this nutso kind of character and Spade is surprisingly effective in a role that I kept picturing Rick Moranis in. The film is gorgeously photographed and features outstanding set direction and film editing, but the overly confusing story takes too long to come into focus.
Adam Sandler and David Spade unite for an overblown comic adventure called The Do-Over, which does provide sporadic laughs, but the often logic defying story does prove that Sandler and Spade are a little long in the tooth for these kind of cinema hi-jinks.
The 2016 comedy stars Adam Sandler as Max, a coroner pretending to be an FBI agent, who runs into his high school BFF, Charlie (Spade) at their high school reunion. Charlie works as the manager of a bank inside a supermarket, still drives the same car he drove in high school, is married to a cheating whore and is constantly disrespected by his obnoxious twin stepsons. Seeing how miserable Charlie is and tired of denying his own misery, Max steals Charlie away for a weekend of partying, during which Max reveals to Charlie that he has faked their deaths and that they have now assumed the identities of two corpses that Max encountered named Richard and Butch. A chance to start over is initially quite thrilling for our boys until it is revealed that the men whose lives they have decided to steal are still in some very serious trouble with some very dangerous people.
Steven Brill, who directed one of my favorite Adam Sandler comedies, Mr. Deeds, has mounted a highly improbable and very expensive action comedy that doesn't go anywhere the viewer expects it to. We are initially pleasantly diverted by the guys' discovery of a key on (or should I say Inside) one of the corpses leads to an obscene amount of money and a lavish hideaway in Puerto Rico and the film initially might make anyone who is unhappy with their life that the solution is faking their death. Of course, the guys learn they're in danger and the thrill is gone, but what was hard to swallow was the eventual relationship between the two dead men and what they were working on at the time they were murdered.
Brill works very hard at making sense out of the hard to believe screenplay and provides plenty of opportunities for the stars to provide the kind of laughs that were accustomed to from them, but a lot of the elaborate physical comedy that populates this film is just beyond the stars' capabilities. A lot of it seems to have been inserted as a method of disguising some of the gaping holes in the screenplay that make up for some pretty sluggish moments in the second act, though it does bounce back for a pretty credible finale...I absolutely loved the finale physical confrontation between two female characters, filmed entirely in slow motion and set to the track of Madonna's "Crazy for You." An initially jarring image that just got funnier as it progressed and the stars just stood there and watched them.
Sandler is no stranger to this nutso kind of character and Spade is surprisingly effective in a role that I kept picturing Rick Moranis in. The film is gorgeously photographed and features outstanding set direction and film editing, but the overly confusing story takes too long to come into focus.