I HAVE MOVED

Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for reading CinemaSlants these few years. I have moved my writing over to a new blog: The Screen Addict. You can find it here: http://thescreenaddict.com/.

I hope you follow me to my new location! You can find an explanation for the move on that site now or on the CinemaSlants Facebook page.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Jack and Jill (2011)

It should be obvious from the advertising campaign alone that Jack and Jill, the latest Happy Madison atrocity, is one of the laziest comedies in recent memory to get a wide release. However, not until you watch the actual movie is the full extent of this laziness revealed: Adam Sandler’s protagonist works in advertising, which is quickly becoming one of the most overused occupations in film. It’s incredibly easy to write this job on a superficial level, and it fits wonderfully into the product placement-laden world that is the Happy Madison oeuvre. If your character is an advertising executive, then suddenly the filmmakers can justify the towers of Pepto Bismol bottles, constant references to Dunkin Donuts, and the appearance of Jared from Subway. Where past forays into Happy Madison product placement have come off as shameless and jarring (see: the Pizza Hut scene in Just Go With It), Jack and Jill attempts to answer these criticisms by simply making product placement Sandler’s job.


Of course, this is just one infuriating detail in a film full of them. Jack and Jill takes every artistic mistake Sandler has made in his film career and throws them into one unholy package. It is a film that entirely ignores the otherwise standard concepts of narrative, continuity and wit, and it throws the final product out to the masses so they gobble it up and fund another one. It doesn’t feel like it was written so much as Sandler came up with some places he’d like to shoot a scene—a Lakers game! A real cruise ship!—and it doesn’t feel like it was directed so much as Dennis Dugan (for my money, the most inept mainstream director going) grabbed his cell phone camera and decided to let the actors work while he leaned back in his La-Z-Boy. Worst of all, the whole thing is built around one of the strangest and most upsetting concepts in recent film memory.

This concept? That Sandler not only plays Jack—the aforementioned ad executive who lives in a swanky Los Angeles house, is married to Katie Holmes and usually wears whatever Sandler came to set in that day—but he also plays Jill, his twin sister that at no point behaves, sounds or looks like an actual person. Is there a story built around this ancient and Norbit­-worthy concept? Not really; Jill simply shows up for the holidays, does some wacky and vulgar things, turns down Al Pacino’s advances and eventually goes home. Oh, and you read that right. This film prominently features Al Pacino as himself, and his absolute devotion to this role is one of the more troubling things I’ve seen. He is the lone aspect of this film that got a single chuckle out of me, but that he decided to go for broke with this film is one-third admirable, one-third misguided, and one-third just plain depressing. This man was in The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon. Now he spends two hours pretending to be attracted to Adam Sandler in drag.

Jack and Jill spends its running time going through the usual Happy Madison motions, including random celebrity cameos that are supposed to be funny in and of themselves, ancillary roles given to Sandler’s old Saturday Night Live buddies and Nick Swardson for some reason, weird children doing weird things, an extended sequence about how Mexican food can cause some trouble in the bowel area, and a finale that piles on the sentimentality, as if we’re supposed to suddenly care about these fart machines, er… characters, that we have spent the last 90 minutes with. No one in this universe is likable, and the film simply uses them in order to get to the next non-joke. It follows Sandler’s increasingly irritating formula to a tee, and it’s starting to make me wonder if Sandler has started making his movies using the old “Cartoon Wars” method. If you don’t know what I’m referencing, you need to watch more South Park.

All this might be mildly forgivable—and perhaps even rise to the level of mediocrity—if the man behind the camera didn’t have such a tenuous grasp on what makes movies work on even the most basic levels. There might be some humor to be found here, but Jack and Jill frequently moves with all the speed of an inebriated sloth. (An early scene, set around a dinner table, goes on for so long I thought for a second I was watching a production of No Exit.) Any potential humor is lost in the clunky editing provided by Tom Costain; some scenes have a laundry list of continuity errors, and there are several shots inserted that have no particular reason to exist. Some jokes go on for far too long—a certain old woman character, potentially chuckle-worthy the first time we see her, seems to get more screen time than even Sandler—and sometimes the movie gives up on jokes before we even get to the punch line. I still believe Sandler himself is funny guy, and maybe he’s still got some funny ideas, but Dugan is a director that just about kills any joke he can get his hands on.

I will leave you with this fact, which will likely cause you to scream with rage: Jack and Jill cost almost $80 million to make. This is about the same budget as Sucker Punch, and as much as I disliked that movie at least you could see the money on the screen. J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 cost just $50 million, and that’s a movie in which an entire suburban neighborhood is destroyed by freaking tanks. Yet Jack and Jill, likely due to the celebrity cameos, somehow cost $30 million more. Not even Bernie Madoff pulled off a scam of this magnitude.

Grade: F

P.S. – At the end of the film, there is a sequence where we get to watch Al Pacino rap about coffee. That’s right, rap. There is a lot of awful in this movie, but that scene physically hurt to watch.

No comments:

Post a Comment