Movie Box Review

JACK AND JILL:  Not At Any Price - 2 Adam Sandlers is 2 Too Many

Does anyone really expect an Adam Sandler movie to be good anymore?  Seriously, if you put aside his occasional relatively serious efforts (Funny People, Reign Over Me, Spanglish, Punch-Drunk Love, all boxoffice failures), and the occasional passable vehicle like Just Go With It earlier this year, what was the last Sandler movie that was actually enjoyable?  Grown Ups?  Bedtime Stories?  You Don't Mess With the Zohan?  I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry?  Click?  The Longest Yard?  How far back do you want to go?

And yet, except for those "serious" misfires, every one of those movies has made money.  So JACK AND JILL, which even by Sandler standards is pretty awful (it's currently at a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 1 favorable review against 51 negatives), is likely to do the same.  

The concept of J&J is that if you love Sandler alone, you'll pass out with  bliss if there are 2 of him.  So Sandler plays both commercial producer Jack Sadelstein, who has a palatial house, a lovely wife (Katie Holmes, mutely pleading for even once chance to be funny) and 2 kids, and the bane of Jack's existence, his twin sister Jill.  Jill is whiny, needy, unattractrive, passive-aggressive, loaded with personal hygiene issues and generally pathetic, and Jack is hard-pressed to put up with her even for a 4-day Thanksgiving weekend.  But then he has to encourage her to stay even longer, because in a monumental contrivance, he needs to sign Al Pacino to appear in a Dunkin Donuts commercial (this is the actual Al Pacino playing Al Pacino), and Pacino is head over heels in love with Jill.

The laziness of Jack and Jill is staggering.    While Sandler deserves due credit for fully committing when he works with real filmmakers,when it comes to the star vehicles produced by his Happy Madison production company, he knows he doesn't have to exert himself.  J&J, like most of those vehicles, is made almost exclusively by Sandler's old buddies:   director Dennis Dugan (his 7th Sandler vehicle) writer Steve Koren (with Sandler himself), and a supporting cast that features such Happy Madison stalwarts as Allen Covert, Nick Swardson and David Spade. 

Sandler's performance(s), too, couldn't be more lacking in effort.  Playing Jill, he just puts on a funny voice out of his SNL skits and wears ugly outfits.  (When Jack himself goes into drag to impersonate Jill, there's no difference between the "real" Jill and Jack's version of her--and it's not because Jack is a brilliant actor.)  No one involved with the movie had any interest in creating believable characters or involving relationships--it's all rudimentary plot mechanics, fart and diarrhea and belching jokes, with a little cloying sentimentality and politically correct crypto-racism (the gardener played by Eugenio Derbez intersperses Latino stereotype gags with grimaces of "I'm keeding!") mixed in.  

The only one who didn't seem to get the memo about how little effort is required here (how did this movie cost a reported $80M?  Does Dennis Dugan quietly put half his budgets in land investments?  Is Happy Madison laundering Colombian drug money?) is, of all people, Al Pacino.  Pacino seems to think he's in Tootsie, or at least he's going to pretend he is, and he throws himself into the woeful material with absolute conviction, mining every conceivable laugh with a limitless willingness to mock himself, and shaming everyone around him.  

It's probably too much to hope, let alone expect, that Adam Sandler would take any of the intelligence and skill he's shown in his infrequent forays out of his comfort zone, and put them into his franchise movies.  As they are, they clearly entertain people, or else audiences wouldn't flock to them every year.  Sandler, who by all accounts is a genuinely good guy, gets to pal around with his friends for a few months every year, mug for the camera, and bank millions of dollars--who can blame him?  If he could just make them a bit less actively painful... but no, not likely.  Jack and Jill will doubtless feed the beast that is the Sandler fanbase.

Let's put off talking about ZOOKEEPER--it's terrible, for those with no time to spare--by mentioning the trailer for Adam Sandler's upcoming Jack & Jill that's attached to it (both movies are produced by Sandler's production company Happy Madison and released by Sony).  While it's naturally unfair to judge a picture that won't be opening until November based on 2 minutes of footage, the trailer was created for the express purpose of generating audience enthusiasm, so it's not completely out of place to say that Jack & Jill, in which Sandler plays twins--one of them female--and thus shares the screen with himself in drag, looks like one of the worst movies ever made.  Actually, it's more specific than that:  Jack & Jill resembles nothing so much as one of the "Sandler" parodies that dotted Judd Apatow's Funny People; it even has in-joke celebrity cameos by Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.  Watching that trailer is the Razzie equivalent of seeing the previews for a movie like The King's Speech:  even as it's playing, you think How is this movie not winning awards?

But I digress.   And I'll continue to do so by noting the marketing campaign for Zookeeper, which has itself been very curious.  The movie is basically A Night At the Museum meets Hitch:  the titular zoo employee (Kevin James) discovers that when no one is looking, the animals in his care become an all-star cast of celebrity voices, and they band together to help improve his inept dating life.  You'd expect a picture like this to be sold to kids and their mothers, but as anyone who watches sports on TV (or goes to websites like espn.com) knows, Sony has been massively selling it to guys, with ads blanketing the NBA playoffs and other broadcasts.  Was James' Paul Blart a magnet for male audiences?  Is it the Sandler connection?  No one will question the strategy if the movie does a big number this weekend (Mitch Metcalf's prediction is $24M), but it's an interesting approach.

OK, fine:  time to talk about the movie.  Zookeeper is directed by Frank Coraci, one of Happy Madison's 2 house directors (Dennis Dugan, who handled Jack & Jill, is the other).  His pictures for the label include The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy and Click, all of them hits (Wedding Singer was even pretty good) but none exactly a showcase for the Auteur Theory.  It's written by a conglomerate of screenwriters:  James, Nick Bakay, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick and David Ronn, who between them couldn't come up with better than a collection of witless animal gags and cliched rom-com storylines (James is pathetically in love with WASPy Leslie Bibb and doesn't even notice the adorable Rosario Dawson, as a zoo vet, under his nose).

Coraci doesn't seem capable of composing an interesting shot, but he also doesn't seem to care.  He's there to make sure the CG and animatronic animals work, which they mostly do, and to let James milk his lovable schlemiel persona.  Most of the animals (Cher, Jon Favreau, Maya Rudolph, Jim Breuer, Don Rickles and Judd Apatow himself) are there for quips only, the exceptions being Sylvester Stallone, wry as the local lion; Sandler, who contributes his high-pitched Old Jewish Man voice as a monkey; and especially Nick Nolte, as a gorilla who becomes James' sidekick and has a storyline that comes to include one of the most blatant product placements in film history and unfortunately also some jarring physical mistreatment of the animals (parents, take note).

There's little charm and less laughter in all this.  James showed real skill in Hitch and a fumbling Everyman quality in Paul Blart, but Happy Madison isn't a place for moderation, so his character quickly becomes strained and overly silly here (when he takes Dawson to his brother's wedding to make Bibb jealous, it's not long before he's splitting his pants, knocking over an ice sculpture and doing a gorilla imitation).  Dawson and Bibb have different extremes of thankless roles, although there's the occasional moment between James and Dawson that suggests they could have had romantic chemistry in a movie with a half-decent script.  The other humans are barely present, and the plotting is awful and twelfth-hand:  yes, James has to chase down the love of his life on her way to the airport.

Parents who are tempted to bring their kids to Zookeeper should also be aware that there are long stretches when those cute talking animals are off screen, and the movie is a relatively straight (and not very good) romantic comedy.  Sports fans:  you're on your own, but ESPN Classic must be airing some 10-year old college football bowl game that'd be more fun to watch.  Say this for Zookeeper, though--it's not Jack & Jill.

(ZOOKEEPER - Sony/MGM - PG - 103 minutes - Director:  Frank Coraci - Script:  Nick Bakay, Kevin James, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick, David Ronn - Cast:  Kevin James, Rosario Dawson, Leslie Bibb, Donnie Wahlberg, Nick Nolte, Sylvester Stallone, Adam Sandler, Cher, Jon Favreau, Judd Apatow - Wide Release)