Just go with it

Sunday, 30 December 2012

Monday, 24 December 2012

Just go with it cast and crew

Directed by
Dennis Dugan

Adam Sandler

Jennifer Aniston

Nicole Kidman

Nick Swardson

Brooklyn Decker

Bailee Madison

Griffin Gluck

Dave Matthews

Kevin Nealon

Rachel Dratch

Allen Covert

Just go with it movie overview

As thoroughly generic as its title, Just Go With It aims at two different constituencies, Adam Sandler’s rude-guy-humor fans and Jennifer Aniston rom-com loyalists and just partially hits both targets. Labored, repetitive and lacking a single moment of surprise in the course of its indulgent two hours, this Sony release nonetheless has one ace to play in the beauteous form of Brooklyn Decker, the slo-mo sight of whom striding out of the sea in a bikini during Super Bowl commercials last weekend no doubt guaranteed that guys won’t object too strenuously to this as a Valentine’s Day weekend date-night choice. Overall commercial outlook is very good.
It won't mean anything to 99.9 percent of its paying customers, but this mildly racy, pictorially sunny PG-13 farce represents a very free reworking of the 1969 hit Cactus Flower (and its Broadway and Paris stage predecessors), with Sandler, Aniston and Decker in the Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn roles, respectively. The age bracket for the older two characters has been lowered by a decade or more, and little of the original remains in Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling’s adaptation other than the medical professions of the leads and some plot machinations leading to an ending that’s preordained in the first few minutes.

With the world-weariness of Funny People out of his system, Sandler treads familiar ground here as Dr. Daniel Maccabee, a glib Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who, for more than 20 years, has racked up considerable romantic mileage from the trick of wearing a wedding ring and pretending to be unhappily married. He has no trouble nailing the hottest young thing at a beach party, math teacher Palmer (Decker), though contrived complications lead to his subsequently lying to her that he’s not only married but has two children.
The only person Danny can’t put anything over on is his assistant Katherine (Aniston), a good-natured, no-nonsense divorcee who actually does have two kids. Very minor efforts -- lab coat, drab hairstyle -- have been made in the early doctor’s office scenes to make Aniston look plainer than she is, but these can’t disguise the fact that Katherine is the woman for Danny; he’s just too dazzled by his latest conquest to notice.
A couple of parties and medical scenes provide director Dennis Dugan (in his sixth collaboration with Sandler) the opportunities for easy yuks at the expense of patients who need some plastic surgery and those who have had too much. In the former category are a woman with one eyebrow considerably higher up her forehead than the other and a large lady with notably mismatched breasts because of an implant collapse. Notable among the latter is the very funny Kevin Nealon as an aging swinger with a face so frozen he can’t close his mouth to swallow a drink.
Understanding her boss’ dilemma as no one else can, Katherine gamely agrees to pose as Danny’s about-to-be ex-wife when Palmer insists upon verifying the truth of his tall tale. The kids (Bailee Madison, Griffin Gluck) get dragged into the act in the bargain, whereupon the whole group, along with Danny’s best friend Eddie (Nick Swardson), fly off to Hawaii, where the bedroom farce plays itself out -- to diminishing returns -- within the confines of a luxury resort.

The breeziness of the dialogue exchanges possess an agreeable casualness; the no-b.s. banter between Danny and Katherine makes them a convincingly good fit, and the variously motivated use of linguistic accents by Eddie (manic German) and Katherine’s young daughter (cultivated British) lightly enlivens matters. But most of the time you wonder how Palmer could be so good-natured that she’s not only willing to put up with the confounding shenanigans of her new acquaintances but actually keen to marry the central perpetrator of them.
Like Will Smith, Sandler appears to want to win approval by showing what a great guy his characters are; crude jokes to the side, he presents Danny as being motivated only by true love, as being great with kids and doing the right thing, however goofily. To his credit, however, he cuts a wide berth for his co-stars; in her big-screen debut, Decker gets plenty of time to prove her ease and natural allure in front of the camera, though Swardson, the kids and Nicole Kidman -- in a surprising, over-the-top comic turn as a long-lost school friend Katherine encounters in Hawaii but would have preferred to remain lost -- are considerably overexposed.
The beneficiary of the general excess is Aniston, who comes off as more energetic, alert and alive than she normally does in her generally formulaic movies. Whether it’s the joshing mode of much of her dialogue or just a happenstance of collaborating with these particular people, she seems to be having fun, and this raises her scenes a notch above the rest.
The extent of product placement in Just Go With It makes you want to escape to a deserted island — or even just to the desert — to recover from the commercial bombardment. The soundtrack’s barrage of familiar pop tunes, especially from the Police, is similarly overdone.

Just go with it movie review

Just Go With It is kind of like what would happen if you combined The Brady Bunch’s Hawaiian episode with one of the first season installments of Who’s Line Is It Anyway? (the season before Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles showed up on the BBC’s stage to make the concept awesome). There’s a lot of romance and ridiculous going on in this movie but if you really boil it down to its most basic elements what it’s about is this: What if a bunch of normal people were forced to spend an entire vacation in Hawaii engaged in some sort of improv? They’d probably be forced to just go with it. Hey, there’s your title.

As a premise that’s a pretty weak idea and the excuse they come up with to make this Hawaiian farce happen is weaker still. Adam Sandler spends two hours with a girl on a beach. She mistakenly believes he’s married and so, to convince her that he isn’t, Sandler constructs an elaborate, multi-level, fake life involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditures and at least half-a-dozen other people who agree to spend weeks playing unnecessarily ridiculous, improvised roles as part of his fake life for no reason at all. Yeah this doesn’t make much sense, unless of course you’re the blonde bimbo Sandler’s wooing with this mentally deficient scheme.

This woman, played by the cinematically curvaceous (and not particularly good at acting) Brooklyn Decker, is supposed to be a sixth grade teacher, yet she actually seems to totally believe that Nick Swardson is a German sheep shipper named Dolph Lundgren. Don’t teachers have to go to college and stuff? I guess not. Is the notion of Nick Swardson playing a guy pretending to be a German sheep shipper named Dolph Lundgren funny? Yes, he’s hilarious. Is this one of the worst plot ideas ever written down on a cocktail napkin by one of Adam Sandler’s booze-soaked buddies? Definitely. It’s more idiotic than Bedtime Stories.

The really shocking thing here is that even though this is the worst idea Adam Sandler has ever turned into a movie, it’s not actually his idea, it’s based on a French play. Maybe I expect too much from the French (it’s probably the accent) but that movie where Adam Sandler rewound David Hassellhoff using his TV remote actually made a lot more sense than this as a premise. I can buy into a drunk guy hallucinating amorous penguins, but I find it vaguely insulting that we’re actually supposed to accept this many people acting this stupidly. Or maybe it’s not so much the premise as the way it’s presented. A plot this ridiculous and over the top belongs in a movie that’s equally ridiculous and over the top. This is the stuff of Saturday morning cartoons but, director Dennis Dugan lets it play out as though he’s making 50 First Dates. He isn’t. Peter Segal directed that one and maybe that’s why it, not this, is one of Sandler’s best movies.

The entire cast plays it straight, as if they’re real people doing real things, and they expect us to accept them as actual individuals living in reality instead of a cartoon. This isn’t that movie. You’ll feel bad for Jennifer Aniston, who has for some reason decided this is the one movie this decade where she’ll attempt to play someone other than Jennifer Aniston. Granted she only manages it for half a film, at some point she has to strut around in a bikini and go back to being Jennifer Aniston, but for at least half the movie she seems more like the Jennifer Aniston who looked like maybe she could play interesting characters in The Good Girl, before she went back to making movies like The Bounty Hunter.

I don’t know what the process was to make this movie or how much time was actually spent coming up with it, but Just Go With It feels like Sandler and Dugan doing something which they know will be an easy paycheck. The little girl actress they cast to play Aniston’s daughter in the film is “Bailee Madison”, does anyone really believe they hired her because she might be good for their movie and not because her name sounds like the title of Sandler’s first film? There’s no way they took any of this seriously.

Just Go With It feels like a movie made mainly to entertain and enrich the guys who made it, with a free trip to Hawaii and scenes constructed in a way which require almost no real effort from its star. Aniston may be standing there acting her ass off, and a blinded Swardson at one point literally throws himself on a sheep, but most of the time Sandler’s contribution is to hang out in a corner behind them, snickering at whatever happens to be going on. I’m saying this with love Adam. I’m a huge fan. I unabashedly love at least 50% of your movies. I even liked You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Whether other people liked it or not, at least with that movie you really seemed to try. Lately though, after Bedtime Stories, Grown Ups, and now Just Go With It you don’t seem to be putting much effort into this shit.

Adam Sandler movies work best when they find one of two levels: Raunchy or sweet. Happy Gilmore is raunchy, hilarious, and filled with rage. The Wedding Singer is delicate and sweet and romantic and all the other things which have made some of Sandler’s movies, his best movies, great. Just Go With It is too watered down to be raunchy or angry and its premise is far too cartoonish and silly ever to tug at anyone’s heart strings. It contains laughs, a few moments here and there which really do seem to work. Yet, this is a movie which doesn’t care enough about any of its characters to show what happens to them. It just sort of stops after this half-hearted narration which tells you they all lived happily ever after for no reason at all. I mean, actually shooting all that stuff would be effort. They might have had to film some of those scenes in a place that didn’t serve non-stop Mai Tais. Sure, even sitting in a corner doing nothing, Sandler is sort of charming and Nick Swardson is genuinely hilarious (and underrated); but the movie spends too long limping around in a middle ground where it doesn’t try and doesn’t seem to care whether it creates anything worth spending time with.