BEFORE: I know, I know, I've heard a lot of terrible things about this movie over the years - and I was content to avoid it completely for a very long time, but then I kind of came back to Adam Sandler through "Uncut Gems" and "Hustle", and then I watched "Blended" earlier this year, and it wasn't THAT bad. I mean, yeah, it was bad but it was at least watchable. Then this one popped up on Netflix - I think Netflix is now contractually obligated to run every Adam Sandler film, even the older and crappier ones.
Then I found that I was watching a lot of movies with twins in them - or, rather, one actor playing twins, as in "Breathe" and "Dead Ringers". Combine this with "Glass Onion", "The Lady in the Van", "The Green Knight" and "The Devil's Double", all of which had one actor or actress playing two roles, and then on top of that the multiverse movies like "The Flash" and "Everything Everywhere All at Once", and suddenly I realized there have been at least FIFTEEN movies I watched this year where an actor took on multiple roles, and that includes cloning, time travel and multiversal counterparts, umm, encountering each other.
Then I read the tagline and learned it's not just a twins movie, it's a Thanksgiving-themed movie. God damn it, and it links to another Thanksgiving movie at that. So it makes the list, and I'll probably hate it, but then I'll never, EVER have to watch it again. So there's that.
Katie Holmes carries over again from "Pieces of April", that's three in a row for her in November, but I also used her as a link in February, so she should finish the year with five films. But that's a bit behind Adam Sandler, who turned up in a few documentaries, and then appeared in a couple of films around Father's Day, so he'll have a total of 8 appearances this year after tonight. That's a lot, but still not enough to finish in first place.
THE PLOT: Family man Jack Saperstein prepare for the annual event he always dreads - the Thanksgiving visit from his fraternal twin sister - the needy and passive-aggressive Jill, who then refuses to leave.
AFTER: OK, it's a bad movie, but it's not THAT bad. OK, well, it is THAT bad, but it was bearable, I got through it. It's terrible and also unfortunate that they just couldn't think of enough things to DO with these two characters. It feels so thrown together, just a bunch of bad ideas strung together to resemble a (very) loose and incoherent plot. It starts out OK, with the same premise as "Pieces of April" - family members who are at odds with each other and don't see eye to eye gather together to celebrate Thanksgiving. Jill Saperstein flies from NYC to visit her twin brother in L.A. and have the holiday dinner with his family. It's all fine until Jack then remembers WHY he moved to L.A. in the first place, because his sister is annoying, crude, loud, needy and passive-aggressive. PLUS she brought 80 bags of luggage with her (how much did she pay in extra baggage fees?) and an equally annoying bird that talks, and also sounds like Adam Sandler doing a voice. (You can take your bird with you on the airplane? I doubt it.)
Jill also doesn't understand the time difference when you fly, and therefore changes her flight to get in at 4 am for some reason, forcing Jack to wake up in the middle of the night to come get her. Yeah, nobody does this, plus nobody is so dumb they wouldn't understand the arrival time on their ticket and therefore change it to the most inconvenient arrival time possible. Yes, technically there are red-eye flights, but very few people take them - though perhaps they are cheaper? From what I've seen, the bulk of people just don't travel overnight, airports are busier during the day and most almost completely shut down at 4 am. Maybe more people travel in the wee hours of the night during busy travel periods like Thanksgiving week if the daytime flights are booked up? Now I've thought about this more than the screenwriter here ever did.
Jack is an advertising executive, or commercial director or something, and works on ads with everyone from Regis Philbin to Jared from Subway (OK, that one didn't age well...) and he's planning to take his family on a cruise right after New Year's. But then he yells at his sister on Thanksgiving and to make it up to her, he lets her stay with them through Hannukah. Then of course another disaster means she has to stay through New Year's, and now she's in danger of spoiling their vacation, too. Meanwhile Jack wants to try to get actor Al Pacino to appear in a Dunkin Donuts commercial to promote their "Dunkaccinos". (NOTE: A dunkaccino used to be the nickname for a mix of half coffee and hot cocoa at Dunkin', but nobody who works at Dunkin now even remembers how to make this item. Another thing that did not age well.)
At one point Jack decides to help his sister try online dating, and his kids set her up with a profile on a matchmaking site, but after she gets no responses Jack posts for her on CraigsList personals - what could POSSIBLY go wrong? She goes on a terrible date and then feels even more terrible, and then Jack remembers that Al Pacino saw her at the Lakers game, and seemed very interested in her. So yeah, it's all leading up to Jack pimping his own sister out to Al Pacino in exchange for him agreeing to star in a commercial. This is a terrible, low-down turn of events. And then when it doesn't work, you can see what's inevitable coming next, Jack dresses up like his own twin sister and ends up at Al Pacino's house with him. Another terrible turn of events, and now we're finding humor in a man dressed in drag to seduce another man, and really, this sort of thing went out of vogue back when Bugs Bunny put on a dress to seduce Elmer Fudd. It's not cool and very insensitive to the trans community in some way, I'm sure.
The movie can't even seem to decide if Jack likes his sister - first he hates her, then he feels sorry for her, then he tries to pimp her out - there's no consistency there, either. Can we just pick one emotion and stick with it? Sure, twins are weird, there's no denying that but they should be understandable and relatable to each other in some way at some point. Why is that so difficult to portray here? Instead we get some goofball "secret language" that they invented as kids and wacko theories like that twins can feel each other's pain (they can't.). I'd say it's all done in the name of comedy, only none of it is funny at all, so what gives?
Making fun of the homeless on Thanksgiving - also not cool. Making fun of lonely single women - also not cool. Making fun of the perverts who date them online, OK, you can do that. Making fun of puppeteers, OK, they're weird so go right ahead. But don't you DARE make fun of the contestants on "The Price Is Right", those are decent Americans, if a little bit odd. This country is a great big melting pot of comedic ideas, but you've got to choose them more carefully, I think. Why, for example, did someone try to find humor in Jack's adopted Indian son who has a compulsion to cover himself with Scotch tape and tape random things to himself? Is this even a thing that a kid would do? Any kid? Again, I kind of doubt it, so why is this even here? It adds nothing to the story and like everything else, just isn't funny.
NITPICK POINT: Didn't we all know by 2011 that you shouldn't talk on a cel phone in a movie theater? Or during a Broadway play? Come on, now....
"Jack and Jill" ended up setting a record for the most Razzie nominations ever - 12 noms in 2011, and then it WON (umm, lost?) all 10 categories, everything from Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Adam Sandler) and Worst Actress (also Adam Sandler, seems fair) to Worst Screenplay, Worst Couple and even Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel - even though it is none of those things. Yep, it was a clean sweep that year for "Jack and Jill", so congratulations?
OK, so maybe that proves this film IS that bad...but it made money, Sandler got paid $20 million and his real-life family got to go on a cruise, so who came out on top?
Also starring Adam Sandler (last seen in "Murder Mystery 2"), Al Pacino (last seen in "De Palma"), Eugenio Derbez (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Tim Meadows (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Nick Swardson (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Allen Covert (last seen in "Blended"), Rohan Chand (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Elodie Tougne, Geoff Pierson (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Valerie Mahaffey (last seen in "French Exit"), Gad Elmaleh (last seen in "The Dictator"), Gary Valentine (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2"), Kristin Davis (last seen in "Couples Retreat"), Norm Macdonald (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), David Spade (last seen in "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag"), Jackie Seiden (last seen in "Ode to Joy"), Sadie Sandler (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Sunny Sandler (ditto), Peter Dante (ditto), Dennis Dugan (ditto), Georgia Hatzis, Jonathan Loughran (last seen in "Blended"), J.D. Donaruma, Tyler Spindel, John Farley (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Robert C. Lopez, Jalen Testerman, Simrin C. Player, Gerardo Hernandez Beltran, Virginia Louise Smith, Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "Uncharted"), Robert Harvey (last seen in "Arsenal"), Santiago Segura (last seen in "Pacific Rim"),
with cameos from Billy Blanks (last seen in "The Clapper"), Christie Brinkley (last seen in "Vegas Vacation"), Drew Carey (last seen in "Gilbert"), Dana Carvey (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Johnny Depp (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Jared Fogle, George Gray, Michael Irvin (last seen in "The Longest Yard" (2005)), Caitlyn Jenner (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Richard Kline (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), John McEnroe (last seen in "McEnroe"), Vince Offer (also last seen in "The Clapper"), Shaquille O'Neal (last seen in "Blended"), Dan Patrick (ditto), Bill Romanowski (ditto), Regis Philbin (last seen in "Val"), and archive footage of Kobe Bryant (last seen in "Citizen Ashe")
RATING: 2 out of 10 Cayenne peppers
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