Box Office Review – Grown Ups

Going into this film the best I was hoping for was a movie similar to the John Hughes written The Great Outdoors. After watching Grown Ups it is more like the below par outdoors, or even the terrible outdoors. Co-written by Adam Sandler and directed by his cohort Dennis Dugan (Happy Gilmore) the film gets together all of Sandler's buddies and tries to recreate what I assume it is like when they are all together. Unfortunately Grown Ups resembles a sitcom sans the laugh track.

The premise is that Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Adam Sandler were on a championship winning basketball team when they were kids. Some thirty years later they all get back together and their different lives lead to some brutal comedy. Sandler is a rich Hollywood agent with a very attractive wife played by Salma Hayek. Their kids are spoiled rich brats who text the nanny when the need something. Chris Rock is a stay at home Dad with stereotypical female qualities and a pregnanat wife played by Maya Rudolph (who apparently only gets cast in films as a pregnant lady). Kevin James is, well it is not quite clear what he does and he has a wife who still breast feeds their four year old played by Maria Bello. David Spade is the single womaniser. Rob Schneider is the older woman loving, new age guy. There are so many characters playing stereotypes in this film that it is hard to keep track of everything. Chris Rock is black, but he is the only one not good at basketball. Kevin James is fat so he falls down a lot and breaks stuff. This stuff may have been funny twenty years ago, but somehow I doubt it. There are many scenes of just dialogue between the five characters that is supposed to make the audience feel like part of the gang, but all of these scenes fail to do anything but bore the audience.

This film is put together so sloppily that it barely even resembles a movie. None of the storylines get completed so what is the point of watching the film. Grown Ups doesn't even capture the fun of summer vacation. The long water park scene is close to torturous. Gags are played multiple times and that is bad because the gags in this film are not funny. Kevin James peeing in a pool, funny right; well let's step it up and have all the main character peeing in a pool.

A lot of times films that bring together many famous actors in an ensemble piece are labeled as being more fun to make then to watch, but that isn't the case with Grown Ups. This movie doesn't seem like it was very fun to make.

A Banana Peel