Just Go With It (*½)
Directed By: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Brooklyn Decker, Nick
Swardson, Bailee Madison, Griffin Gluck, Nicole Kidman, Dave Matthews
Seen: March 19th 2011
*½
Out of ****
Just Go With It is just another Adam Sandler comedy, assured to make
money regardless of its quality, which is terrible at best with a flat story
and lifeless humour. Those who enjoy Sandler will enjoy Just Go With It, those
who don’t probably won’t. Danny (Sandler) almost got married, years ago, only
to overhear his fiancée and her friends talking about her infidelity before the
wedding. That evening he went to a bar to drown his sorrows, still wearing his
wedding band, and managed to hook up with a beautiful girl (Minka Kelly) by
telling of his awful marriage. Years later this has become Danny’s standard strategy:
picking up women who sympathise with his suffering in wed-lock, giving him a
string of meaningless, no-strings-attached one night stands.
When Danny then meets the very young Palmer (Decker) at a party, and
finds her to be someone he can really connect with, he has to come up with a credible
explanation for the wedding ring. Instead of telling the truth, which would
most likely have caused him to lose the girl, he decides to invent a whole life,
one where he is married to Katherine (Aniston), his assistant, whom he names
Devlin, a name he picks from one of Katherine’s college stories. The meeting he
then arranges with Palmer to have Devlin (Katherine) herself tell Palmer they
are getting divorced also ends on a note of failure, as Katherine lets slip
that she has children. When Danny approaches the children to have them act as
his children in this charade, they blackmail him into taking all of them on a
Hawaii holiday, and even Danny’s friend Eddie (Swardson) comes along, as the fake
Devlin’s fake husband, Dolf Lundgren.
In Hawaii, Katherine runs into the real Devlin (Kidman) and her
husband Ian Maxtone-Jones (Matthews), the self-proclaimed inventor of the iPod;
and blah, blah, blah… [if by now this isn’t already too much of a stretch for
you, do go see the movie, you might enjoy it…]. Things get more and more
complicated in efforts to conceal the lie; and yes, the humour doesn’t get any
better in the cover up attempts. Dolf Ludgren even resuscitates a sheep, by
treating it with a combination of CPR and the Heimlich manoeuvre, which is one
of the comedic “highlights” of this snore-fest of a movie.
Just Go With It had a portion of the audience laughing all the way
through, but I suspect those are the same people who laugh at anything just
because it is labelled “funny” or “comedy”, and not because it is really funny.
I almost expected laugh tracks during some scenes in the movie, because the
humour was of such a nature that the audience would have to be reminded that
what they are seeing is intended as a joke. My disdain for this movie grows as
I write this review, it is filled to the brim with infantile humour, from the
sheep-saving to Dave Matthews (the same one who makes such brilliant music)
picking up a coconut with his ass as a precursor to the revelation that his
character is gay; to name but a few terrible instances. See Just Go With It at
your own peril, you might laugh a few times, but you’ll walk out of the cinema
with a creeping sense of disgust and dissatisfaction.
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