I admit that I wasn’t expecting much from this movie, yet even still I was fairly disappointed with it. I neither particularly like nor dislike Adam Sandler or his movies as a rule. I think a few of the films are great. He does his best work when Drew Barrymore is his co-star. 50 First Dates is easily his best film. The Wedding Singer is quite good as well. The other one that I like a lot, one without Barrymore, is Happy Gilmore. The rest are either completely average (Mr. Deeds, etc) or complete misfires (The Waterboy, Big Daddy, etc). Well, this one is to be filed under the misfires. While I didn’t dislike it quite as much as The Waterboy, it’s still pretty lame.

Writing: How in the world this script has the pedigree of talents like Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor is beyond me. It’s a mix of obvious gay jokes, one after another, and incredibly lame soapboxed political correctness. Despite a few witty moments, it all falls miserably flat or embarrassingly awkward. I sat there dreading the ending that was obviously coming, and sure enough by the end I was presented with just such an ending. Some scripts can get away with that if they play into it well enough and round out their characters by the time they get there. This film doesn’t pull that off. When it wants to be politically correct, it takes the usual Hollywood approach of making everyone on the side of its argument nice and likable and the opposing side complete whack job zealots (in this case, religious groups in general). It takes the writing talents of a kindergartener to crank this stuff out.

Production: Nothing to say here, really. Everything about this production is as incredibly average for the genre as could possibly be.

Cast: For the most part, this is the only strength of the film. Adam Sandler is amiable enough, though not particularly convincing as a womanizer, and Kevin James fits his role well enough. Highlight supporting performances to Dan Aykroyd and Ving Rhames, both of whom manage to make something of their 100% stereotyped roles. Other supporting roles are complete and total failures, surprisingly from the likes of Steve Buscemi. Rob Schneider is awful, but to whom does this come as a huge surprise? I have no idea why Sandler continues to drag Schneider’s dead weight on screen from movie to movie.

Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams comes through with a staggeringly average, stereotyped score. For a movie that is supposedly about the problems of stereotypes, almost everything about the movie could be adequately described by the term.