GROWN UPS 2 (Two  Stars)
U. S. Dennis Dugan, 2013

Some movie guys never grow up. But then, why should they, if the audience won’t grow up either? Adam Sandler—the Harold Lloyd of toilet gags, the Buster Keaton of dick jokes—strikes again in Grown Ups 2, a been-there-crapped-that sequel to the astonishingly successful 2010 buddies-gone-wild comedy Grown Ups. In that world wide smash hit, you’ll remember, Sandler played Hollywood superagent Lenny Feder who returned to his New England home  town to hook up again with his best buddies and fellow middle school basketball teammates—smarty-pants Kurt McKenzie (Chris Rock), affable Eric Lamonsoff (Kevin James), sneaky Marcus Higgins (David Spade) and  elusive Rob Hillard (Rob Schneider)  to say goodbye, at a put-the-“fun”-in-funeral service to their beloved recently deceased old coach, and later restage their championship hour of triumph by replaying the team they beat. (Sandler, as I recall, took all the shots.)

Accompanying the guys, occasionally, were their wives—Lenny’s feisty Roxanne (Salma Hayek), Kurt’s talky Deanna (Maya Rudolph), Eric’s tolerant Sally (Maria Bello) and Rob‘s Golden Girl Gloria (Joyce van Patten). Marcus was a bachelor—though sometimes, we learn here, a backsliding one. There were also  numerous children, in-laws, townspeople and other colorful characters, plus a zillion or so jokes, good and bad, from writers Sandler and Fred Wolf and Happy Madison house director Dennis Dugan.

Sandler’s humor is often rough, if a little Jerry Lewis-ishly sentimental by the end, but Grown Ups, which was about infantile guys reliving the past but also growing up a little, was both congenial and even a little sweet—and it mopped up at the box-office, while displeasing many critics (who don’t pay for their tickets anyway), me included. Now comes the sequel—minus Rob Schneider. (I‘m not saying this is a loss comparable to the disappearances of  Richard Castellano and Robert Duvall in the sequels to The Godfather, but Schneider should have done the movie.)

Anyway, they can’t play the big game again, so writers Sandler and Wolf and Tim Herlihy have subbed a battle of the generations between Lenny’s gang and  a bunch of bullying cutie frat boys led by Taylor Lautner in full smirk, plus a big ‘80s nostalgia party, along with comical chases monitored by huge local cop, Officer Fluzoo, played by real-life basketball great Shaquille O’Neal. (The part was written with all the flair with which Shaq once shot free throws.) At the ’80s bash, Lenny dresses up as Bruce Springsteen—and Lautner’s  ab-happy frat pack show up, along with Stone Cold Steve Austin. An unseemly brawl ensues.

In other words, it’s just another silly Sandler movie, with a lot of silly gags about unmentionable body parts and secretions and what Chuck Berry once called “My ding-a-ling”—followed by a nice little bit extolling the virtues of  family life and friendship — when, the way the movie was going, you might have expected a nice little bit extolling the virtues of poo-poo, diddly-dwot and Number Two.

Grown Ups 2 is a movie, after all, that begins with a scene in which Lenny awakens in his halcyon mansion of  a home to the sight of  an elk prowling around his bedroom and eventually whizzing in his face and then running off to wreak more elk havoc. It’s a movie whose the most memorable (unfortunately) gag (and I do mean gag), involves a frozen yogurt guy fixing the chocolate spigot on his machine, but shot at such a suggestive angle that the brown  syrupy substance dribbling past his legs seems to be not chocolate but something else—something that rhymes with pap and Hialeah. This is a movie that actually coins a new word for bodily functions, and a new kind of bodily function: to “burpsnart”—or to burp, sneeze and fart all at the same time. This is a movie where one (secondary) character picks and eats his own belly-button lint. This is a movie where no bodily fluid is sacred, no joke too crass and no breast too big.

Adam Sandler has made his share of bad movies (this one among them). But he’s a funny guy (and so are his friends), with an ingratiating doofus smile that takes the sting our of some of his more sadistic and malodorous gags. I‘m not ashamed to admit that Sandler has occasionally made me laugh and probably will again, even at his bad movies, which are most of them. He’s a rare combination of leading man and doofus, stud and stooge, as if Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had been cloned or mind-melded together. And his movies tend to be sports, show biz, buddy and/or sex fantasies with good cinematography (Theo van de Sande here), which is why audiences, especially male audiences, respond to them. But his shows too often soar off into silliness, and they also tend to wear on you. (Exceptions: Punch Drunk Love, The Wedding Singer, Funny People.)

Recently he’s become one of the more reliable bêtes noire for movie reviewers—attacked for his infantile jokes and general tastelessness. It’s almost become a cliché, but  if he really wanted to seal the deal for the bad review crown, he ought to team up with Michael Bay. Think of it: They could contrive a horror movie, where Sandler and his buddies ran around pursuing women with big mammaries while huge monstrous erector set robot toys, who are mysteriously capable of massive burpsnarting and sharfpiddling and boogerbucking, march into some poor city, probably New York again, and proceed to barf and crap and pick their noses over everybody and everything, while telling awful jokes and eating belly-button lint. Now there’s a movie that would really generate active hostility in the audience—and maybe inspire a lot of reviews full of really bad jokes.

Meanwhile we can only wait and anticipate the inevitable “Grown Ups 3: The Beginning,” in which a band of insane movie moguls invade Lenny’s town, kidnap him and his friends and forcibly chain them into huge cribs and huge malfunctioning diapers—while outside Rob Schneider rises from the dead, zombified and runs amok, demanding his part back. I don’t actually believe anyone would make a picture like that, but these days, you never know. This is the End? Anyway, who cares? It’s all just a lot of  bullsharfart. Or elk doody.

Other ratings:

PACIFIC RIM (Three Stars)
U. S.: Guillermo del Toro, 2013

THE HUNT (Four Stars)
Sweden/Denmark: Thomas Vinterberg, 2013

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