Rating- * (1/5)
There comes a time in a filmmaker’s career when he starts to slump. It’s inevitable; it happens to everyone, even the greatest of them. The key is how they deal with their slump and whether they can emerge from it a better filmmaker. Now this transformation is made much more difficult if the films made during the slump do just as well at the box-office, if not better, than the better films. If your bad work still makes money, why bother to make good movies anymore? Now certainly I am not trying to suggest that Adam Sandler is Orson Welles, or even Ed Wood for that matter; this guy’s not in it to make legitimate movies. The purpose of an Adam Sandler movie is to make you laugh for an hour and a half, which is a very noble cause in my book. But the aforementioned slump rule applies to comedy filmmakers as well as dramatic filmmakers, and I believe Adam Sandler began to lose his comedic edge around the time he made The Wedding Singer. Up until then, his movies were all mindless, slapstick, juvenile romps that only had enough plot to accommodate the rest of the movie. Movies like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore were completely stupid and lots of fun. But once he started to take himself seriously and inject some lame excuse for a romantic storyline into the mix, he began to lose me and many of his more fun-loving fans. Mr. Deeds follows Sandler’s recent tradition of mildly funny romantic comedies that can’t decide when to be goofy and when to be sweet. There are a few moments that result in mild chuckles, mostly coming from Deeds’ butler played by John Turturro. The major problem comes from the fact that Sandler’s character is supposed to be a naïve, lovable nice-guy character, which is inherently not funny. Sandler is best suited to his trademark role: some variation of his Canteen Boy character from Saturday Night Live, a mentally slow guy with a rage problem. This is the character he used in Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and The Waterboy, which in my opinion are his funny movies. The film sneaks in moments of goofy, off-the-wall behavior but quickly moves away from them because Deeds cannot be made to look like a jerk for even one second. This movie could definitely work if you had a very genuine lead actor like John Cusack and did it as a full on romantic comedy instead of what it is, but unfortunately the studios feed us more crap as usual. I want to believe that the disastrous reviews this movie received, mine being the least harsh of them all, could make Sandler wake up and go back to the old slapstick routine, but the reported $35 million Mr. Deeds made over the weekend may send him a different message, one that he is probably more likely to listen to. Do yourself, and Adam Sandler, a favor and don’t waste your time on this one.