Just wow, watching Grownups is like watching a piece of Comedy History go into retirement and not very gracefully. Remember the moment in your life when you realized that Saturday Night Live was no longer funny? My realization came way back when Eddie Murphy left, I haven’t watched the show since. So I fortunately missed the Sandler and Spade years. Sandler is a likable enough guy, but I never found him particularly funny and that’s the problem with this movie. Everyone is sort of likeable, all involved are clearly enjoying their SNL reunion but there’s not much of a movie here and it’s not particularly funny. Any movie that has not one but four different pee jokes tells you something. But I guess it’s better than having 4 or 5 fart jokes – oh, wait….
What happens when you put one genuinely funny guy – who isn’t anymore (Chris Rock) with 4 other guys (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, and Rob Schneider) who I never found particularly funny, not much comedy gold. The story is threadbare and has a basic set up, 5 nerdy kids defy the odds to win a basketball championship it bonds them as friends for life and reunite when their old coach dies. The problem with the movie is it’s filled with lame moments when the 5 of them just spend a lot of time riffing on each other. Like real good friends do, but the playful ribbing just falls flat. For some reason Kevin James spends ten minutes walking around with a KFC Bucket on his head and peeing in pools and lakes – that’s high brow comedy folks. I didn’t hate Grownups it had some cute moments and obviously it looked like they had a lot of fun making the movie, but they didn’t bother to come up with a real script and it’s just kind of sad watching a group of comedians lose their edge.
Final Grade C-
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 6.27.2010
Wow! You didn’t hate this incredible piece of excrement?
If I could erase it from my memory, I would. The Razzies were created expressly for movies like this.