Happy Madison Productions has one of the most robust track records of cynical, lazy and ultimately indifferent filmmaking, and just because you’re getting older, it’s no reason to slow down.
"Grown Ups 2" is a comedy starring four men undergoing separate suburban difficulties that have nothing to do with one another and nothing to do with anything, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a movie. I mean, just look at the cast. Four illustrious (quote-unquote) funny men: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade. This has got to work. Let’s take it from the top.
Interior. Morning. Open on a bedroom in what appears to be an affluent household where Adam Sandler is gently waking to meet the gaze of an elk or reindeer, or something, standing in the room. In slow, gentle alarm, he tries to wake his wife (Salma Hayek) to get her to open the window to let it out. When she turns over and sees the animal, she screams, and everyone in the house is swiftly doused in the urine of a panicking antelope or whatever.
Okay, that made no sense, and I didn’t really laugh either, but that was just the icebreaker. It’s going to take off here soon.
No.
Well, I mean, at least there are three other main characters, so if one of the bunch is a little bit boring, the others will pick up the slack.
Sorry.
Each of these guys may have been assigned fictitious names for their “fictitious” characters, but I missed them. They have moved their families to their old hometown from Los Angeles. There are likely reasons for this, but I refuse to believe they matter.
Their town is curiously populated with people who are somewhere between insanely oversexed or obnoxiously creepy or stupid, or some combination thereof. This gives our ensemble of four losers a reason to go all over town and congratulate one another as they hurl grade-school insults at everyone. That’s the entire formula laid bare. Don’t wash, just rinse in stag urine and repeat ad nauseam. It would be fine if you were laughing. But you’re not laughing. The 11-year-old boys in the back row are laughing. This is a film about mid-life crises aimed at middle-school children. It can’t get much more niche than that.
Speaking of which, the children left in the margins of the script occasionally show up for a little screen time as a substitute for parental involvement. These kids are essentially being abused throughout between Sandler’s explosive, all-in-good-fun threats to their safety, James’s son’s confidence being considered so precious that he’s allowed to develop a mysterious understanding of arithmetic, and Spade’s coaxing his estranged delinquent son to dress up as Hall & Oates with him.
I don’t know how to approach what this has to say about the thought process behind scripting this movie, as the film seems to make no presumptions whatsoever. There are comedies that insult intelligence and others that solely go for gross-out gags. Stagnant and scatological, Grown Ups 2 doesn’t have the nerve to try to offend you. None of these considerations crossed the screenwriters' minds—it is as though they're unaware people are supposed to watch it.
Like many Happy Madison productions of yesteryear, this one is without a touch of hilarity, sincerity or dignity. It amounts to an arbitrary cast and pseudo-amusing cameos standing in circles apparently ad-libbing, oblivious to the cameras nearby. Hayek doesn’t necessarily disappoint on any front—her energy and cuteness are a fine juxtaposition of “acting” in the film, and Nick Swardson’s psychotic, heavily drug-addled school bus driver breaches into some low echelon of physical comedy. (Imagine Buster Keaton discovering the groin kick and building up to blasting himself with a self-inflating raft.)
Sandler threatens people and tries to play it off as tomfoolery, James teaches everyone how to burp, sneeze, and fart at the same time, Rock cracks about being black and David Spade scoots around with little-man syndrome. Nothing is accomplished. Ever.
Maybe it was really important to see the original beforehand. Maybe that’s where all my problems lie.
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