ADAM SANDLER IN THAT'S MY BOY

year: 2012 rating:*

Sounding a cross between Little Nicky and Billy Madison, Adam Sandler provides his worst performance in a comedy that makes JACK AND JILL seem like THE WEDDING SINGER. We begin with a pretty boy pre-teen (did Sandler ever look like this?) having an affair with his lustful teacher. She has a baby, goes to jail, and Sandler’s Donny becomes a media sensation seen through the opening credits.

The real story begins thirty years later as Donny’s uptight son “Todd,” played by hipster era Sandler, Adam Samberg, is about to land a big promotion and marry his beautiful high-maintenance fiance. Meanwhile Donny, in his own seedy neck of the woods, owes a bundle for taxes and will go to jail if he doesn’t get fifty grand. With an offer to appear on a tabloid show, he has to maneuver his son, who he hasn’t seen in years, to visit mom (the teacher) in jail for a big payoff.

Dad and his boy reunite in Todd’s boss’s summer home before the wedding, and most of the film has the duo tricking everyone – Donny’s supposedly his best friend and Todd, living a lie and having changed his name from “Han Solo,” just wants to be normal. With an abundance of “toilet jokes” that keeps pushing a ragged envelope – from masturbation to incest to everything you can possibly imagine – the plot is all but forgotten.

Donny's a sloppy playboy but lacks the charm that'd make us believe any woman would fall for him while Todd remains a deer caught in headlights, never changing his "I can't believe this is happening" expression. And an all-night bachelor party, trying for the stuff THE HANGOVER characters would have forgotten, is full of bawdy situations completely lacking humor or purpose. Not even pop culture punchline Vanilla Ice (as Todd's surrogate uncle), a cameo by Todd Bridges or an abundance of Roth-Era Van Halen can save the day... or night. It’s in the 11th hour, when the wedding approaches and the truth of Samberg’s betrothed is in question, that we begin to wonder what'll happen next. But by then it’s too, too much, much too late.