Jill is delighted to be coming to L.A. for Thanksgiving; Jack just wants her in and out as fast as possible. He’s also in the middle of a job crisis: Unless he gets Al Pacino to star in his company’s next Dunkin Doughnuts TV Spot, the doughnut people, his biggest client, are threatening to vamoose. And there’s a family problem with Jill: Unless Jack finds some kind of potential mate for his twin, she may crack up and never leave, possibly tripling his laundry bills, besides driving them all crazy.

The solution comes with the breathtaking ease of bad, obvious screenwriting. Al Pacino himself (played by none other than Al Pacino) is tracked down at a Lakers game, meets Jill (whom Jack generously brought along), falls in love with her Bronx accent, and agrees in principal to hawk doughnuts for Jack if he sets things up with Jill. Jill, unfortunately, doesn’t like Al, a weird reaction for this lonely woman, but one that writer Steve Koren tries to explain by having her say that she doesn’t know or like movies. Instead, Jill seems more drawn to the Sadelsteins’ gardener Felipe (Eugenio Dergez), a nice guy with a mean grandma (also Dergez).

They all, or most of them, wind up eventually on a Caribbean Cruise liner, where — I know you must have guessed this — Jack has to cover Jill’s hostility to Al by dressing up as his sister and ramming two cantaloupes into his brassiere.

This all plays about as dumb as it sounds — though it’s also funny at times. A lot of that is thanks to Pacino, who saves the movie over and over again.

We don’t tend to think of Pacino as a comic actor — instead we remember brooding Michael Corleone and his dark sad eyes, or bank robber Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon screaming “Attica! Attica!” But, in fact, he can be hilarious. If you’ve ever seen his last explosive monologue in The Devil‘s Advocate as a corporate demon gone mad, you‘ve witnessed one of the great movie comedy arias of the 80s.

Pacino doesn’t play comedy all that much, but he should.  In Jack and Jill, where his role is basically a protracted in-joke, he gets lots of laughs from a script — and from the show’s mock Dunkin Doughnut commercial (where he sings the praises of a new treat called the Dunkacino) — that really isn’t all that funny. But with his manic delivery and pricelessly straight face, he makes it all work like gangbusters.

Now, Sandler. Sometimes good, sometimes awful. But at least he has the guts to carry through on his (or his writer’s) sometimes bad, sometimes okay ideas. And some of what he does as Jack (or Jill) is fun. It’s not often a comedian can be his own straight man, but here he‘s Dean Martin to his own Jerry Lewis, George Burns to his own Gracie Allen, John Belushi to his own Danny Aykroyd. And though he’s often annoying — his falsetto can be like a chalk-squeak — he does get laughs. Guilty ones, sometimes, it’s true. But laughs. You try it. It ain’t easy.

Sandler is guided here, again, by his main Happy Madison Man, director Dennis Dugan, whose movies have reportedly grossed a billion dollars, and who owes it all to a few farts and poops and a tantrum or two. Dugan’s best directorial work here, other than just clearing the stage for Pacino, is his nifty before-and-after credits sequences with lots of sets of actual twins.

Meanwhile, I have a (serious) suggestion. Al Pacino is funny. Instead of lamenting that nobody‘s making any Godfathers or Dog Day Afternoons or Scarecrows for him these days, or beating up on Adam Sandler, why doesn’t somebody in Hollywood try to write Mr. Dunkacino a first rate full-fledged, comedy script with lots of space for comic arias, where he can let loose, out-Herod Herod, and kill the crowd. Maybe De Niro (or Nicholson) can be his Dino. Sandler can do a cameo. I mean: Who can it hurt?

Extras: Featurettes.

Footloose (Also Two Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Two Stars)
U. S.: Craig Brewer, 2011 (Paramount)

Small town anti-rock ‘n roll ban-the-ball conservatives, led by a charismatic preacher (Dennis Quaid), are confronted by a rocker from the city (Kenny Wormold), who rallies the teen troops while wooing the preacher’s daughter (Julianne Hough) and winning over the preacher’s wife (Andie MacDowell). The 1984 original of this movie, from the era of Flashdance and Fame — starring Kevin Bacon, John Lithgow, Lori Singer and Dianne Wiest respectively in the four main roles listed above — had a silly story, but a good cast and an extremely catchy song score by Jim Steinman, Kenny Loggins, lyricist-scriptwriter Dean Pitchford and others. And it was given a proper gloss by the sometimes underrated musical movie director Herbert Ross (Pennies from Heaven).

Here director Craig Brewer takes over for a remake (Pitchford gets co-credit on the screenplay), and updates and modernizes it all. The song score (“Footloose,“ “Let’s Hear it from the Boy,“ “Holding out for a Hero”) is almost as memorable and infectiously done as it was in 1984. The story is just as silly though — sillier maybe — and the teen revolt, though a crowd-pleaser in both movies (as well as a hit on stage in the Broadway version ) always struck me as a crock. The songs, though, still make you move. Let’s hear it for the boy. (Chris Penn, if you remember.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars) 

U.K.; Terry Jones/Terry Gilliam, 1975 (Sony)

“Le Morte d’Arthur’ mortified. Priceless film humor from the finest team of deadpan satirists and silly-ass-skewerers in British history: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam, the Lone Yank. (Well, maybe the Goons are the best. Maybe. By a hair.)