BEFORE: October gives way to November, and November means Election Day, Thanksgiving and football, right? I'll try to get to politics later on in the month - but before I started my horror-film chain, I was watching Adam Sander films. I know, the World Series is still being played, but since the Yankees are in it and not the Sox, I'm done with baseball and ready for football...
THE PLOT: A football team water boy discovers he has a unique tackling ability and becomes a member of the team.
AFTER: As usual, Sandler's character is mentally defective, and I just sort of felt that this whole movie suffered from some form of similar lack of intelligence. I can understand the whole underdog success-story thing - but are you telling me that the best tackler in football reads at a grade-school level? I mean, I suppose it's possible, but does it really create a character that I should be rooting for?
And does he have to live in a swamp, and have a mother who refers to everything she doesn't approve of as "the Devil!", and talk like a darn baby? It's just too much to swallow...
Kathy Bates and Henry Winkler should be better than this - doesn't Kathy Bates have an Oscar? And she's reduced to cooking up snake gumbo and playing badminton with a horse? Really?
I learned exactly nothing about football from this film - do teams even have "waterboys"? Or do they just use a cooler? Like with boxing films, I would appreciate a little something about the psychology of the game, the intricacies of different plays - not just "Idiot gets mad, and tackles really well..."
RATING: 3 out of 10 playbooks
I watched this one quite a while after it's theaterical run, and from the quality of the film, I thought it was a low budget film. While I don't have anything against Adam Sandler, I don't go out of my way to watch his films. I would say this was the second best film of his career, and somewhat entertaining. The only question I have is, what else did the Fonz have to do??
ReplyDeleteThis is the classic "Why People Hate Adam Sandler" movie. He sticks with what worked for him on SNL: mugging for the camera and using a weird voice. Which is boring in a 4-minute sketch but in a 90-minute movie leads to the defenestration of a $1000 HDTV.
ReplyDeleteWhy doesn't the lad try acting? It's so much easier on the facial muscles.
I think "defenestration" is my favorite word of all time.
ReplyDeleteOh, I don't give a crap about the movie...