Friends are good to have.  While this sentiment may seem trite, the movie Grown Ups does go a long way towards proving it.  Namely, it proves that if your friend is Adam Sandler you will never go broke.  Just ask Rob Schneider.  This movie is just loaded with Sandler’s buddies from Saturday Night Live.  In addition to Schneider, Chris Rock, and Davis Spade who star as the leads, the film also includes Colin Quinn, Tim Meadows, Maya Rudolph, and Norm MacDonald.  Those SNL folk sure do like to stick together.  In addition, previous Sandler collaborators Kevin James and Steve Buscemi are featured.  The lesson here for actors is that working with Adam Sandler is probably the greatest job security in the movie industry.

Now I tend to like Adam Sandler’s movies.  Maybe because Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison came out when I was around 12, which is the perfect age to appreciate Sandler’s style of humor.  Maybe because it took hold early, I’ve always had an appreciation for his movies.  The Wedding Singer, Little Nicky, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan: not what anybody would consider high art but I’ve liked them all.  Even Mr. Deeds, a remake of a Frank Capra film with Sandler taking the lead originated by Gary Cooper (a truly awful idea to any serious film buff), was to my liking.  The man just taps into my inner immaturity and makes me laugh.  Usually.

The plot of the film is simple.  Five boys played on a basketball team in 1978.  They won the championship thanks to guidance of their coach, played by Blake Clark (Home Improvement, Toy Story 3).  Thirty-two years later, the Coach has died and the grown-up kids return to their childhood home for the funeral.  As adults they are played by Sandler, James, Rock, Spade, and Schneider.  That set-up takes maybe the first twenty or thirty minutes of the movie and the rest is pretty much just the guys hanging out.

Adam Sandler plays Lenny, a Hollywood agent with two spoiled rich sons and an adorably cute daughter.  Lenny’s main concern during the trip is teaching his kids the joys of a more simple childhood like the one he had, since his kids are becoming major league assholes.  He’s embarrassed by his wealth and in a lame running gag tries to convince his old buddies that his maid (Di Quon) is a foreign exchange student.  Kevin James is Eric.  He’s fat.  That’s pretty much the whole joke with him.  Get it?  Chris Rock is Kurt, a stay-at-home dad who loves cooking and is frequently emasculated by his family.  Or at least he is in two or three scenes.  In case you hadn’t caught on by now this isn’t a huge character development movie.  David Spade is Marcus, the only one of the guys who doesn’t have a family.  Rob Schneider is Rob, the guy who practices a brand of New Age-iness that exists solely as a set-up for jokes.

The film actually works best when the guys are just riffing on each other.  Even then it’s not on the same level as the casts of most Judd Apatow movies.  The attempts the movies makes at more serious matters of growing older and becoming mature fall flat.  Probably because this is a ridiculously immature movie and really shouldn’t try to present itself as anything else.  Sandler’s attempts to teach his kids the joys of a simpler childhood just come off as saccharine.  Chris Rock’s desire to be taken seriously is hard to… well, take seriously in a movie that isn’t meant to be taken seriously.  The bigger attempts at humor and physical comedy mostly fall flat.  Kevin James falls down because he’s fat.  That’s like a whole joke in this movie.  There are a few good bits with an injury Schneider sustains during a game of “arrow chicken” and also a stunt by Steve Buscemi that goes very predictably awry but most of the physical humor is pretty bad.  David Spade falls face first into a pile of shit.  That should really tell you all you need to know…

Because the movies fashions itself as a “family” film, they have to have families.  This sort of detracts from the “buds riffing on each other” moments which are just about the only thing that consistently works in this movie.  Salma Hayek Pinault (sporting a new married surname) plays Lenny’s wife Roxanne, a successful fashion designer who only expected to stay the night before jetting off to Milan.  She is played at first as a something of a nagging workaholic, but has a sudden and only barely explained change of heart at one point that is supposed to make it all okay.  It’s really enough to make you forget that she’s been nominated for an Oscar before.  Speaking of acclaimed actresses, Maria Bello is also in this movie as Eric’s wife Sally.  She sports big fake tits which she still uses to feed to her four-year-old son.  That’s the joke there and sums up most of her screen time.  Maya Rudolph plays Kurt’s wife Deanne, who is very pregnant.  The pregnancy is the only thing her performance in this movie has in common with her great roles in Away We Go and A Prairie Home Companion (damn, she’s pregnant a lot).  In Away We Go, she had a subtle nuanced role which she performed with a lot of dignity.  Here she mostly just makes fun of her husband for liking to cook.  Joyce Van Patten plays Rob’s wife Gloria.  She’s much older than him.  That’s the joke and though it isn’t really funny to begin with, they just keep going back to it.  Madison Riley and Jamie Chung play Rob’s grown daughters.  All they really do is walk around looking hot.  That’s enough.

Grown Ups mostly just smacks of missed opportunities.  Entire characters and even entire storylines seem superfluous.  If Sandler wanted to make a movie about some of the issues of growing older, maybe he should have tried a more serious approach.  Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, Reign Over Me, and even the overlong Funny People prove that he can handle serious and still be funny doing it.  Instead it seems like he tried to make an immature movie about maturity and the incongruity dooms it from the start.  Grown Ups is a movie that just isn’t for grown-ups.

Well, another week with two articles.  I should make a habit of this I think.  Next week I’m going to try to get a review of The Last Airbender but I’m definitely going to do an article called “5 Vampires Cooler Than the Sparkly Douches in Twilight” (or something to that effect).  As usual: mini-reviews can be found here and tweetage can be found here.  Until next week…