Valentine’s Day was here and with it came its traditional romantic comedy. This year’s features Adam Sandler, in hopes that men will actually want to see it. Too bad that Sandler can’t act as anything beyond a Saturday Night Live character.
Just Go With It has Sandler playing his typical romantic comedy character: a bland man with one interesting characteristic he changes from movie to movie, just so the audience can tell him apart from one movie to another. This year’s quirk is that he pretends to be married to pick up chicks. If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because it’s wholeheartedly ripped off from an episode of Seinfeld.
Sandler then meets a girl played by Brooklyn Decker (Chuck, Ugly Betty), and after a night of emotional connection gained through sex on a beach, they fall in love. Then Decker finds the wedding ring in his pocket and Sandler makes up a story about being in the middle of a divorce so that she stays with him. Decker then has what is probably one of the best ideas in the entire movie, when she asks to meet this terrible soon-to-be ex. Sandler convinces his office assistant, played by Jennifer Aniston, to play the role.
The Seinfeld theme continues throughout the movie as the characters pack lie upon lie on Decker. One of the more despicable moments is when Aniston lets it slip that she has kids, thus forcing Sandler to pretend that her kids are his. The kids are into playing along, but it’s soon made obvious that they’re already dealing with damage from their own abandoned father. The boy actually breaks down crying at one point about how his father is never there for them only for Sandler to chew him out later for breaking character and making him look bad. This is then shadowed when Sandler tells the kids that he’s actually going to pretend that they died horribly in a car accident so that Decker doesn’t have to see them again.
Another point of bad ideas is when they all decide to go on vacation to Hawaii. Sandler’s cousin, played by Nick Swardson, pretends to be Aniston’s new lover, and for no reason whatsoever fakes a German accent. This just adds to the already spine-jarring fake British accent Aniston’s daughter sports through most of the movie.
As a final nail in the film’s annoying coffin, Oscar winner Nicole Kidman makes a little cameo appearance as an old “frenemy” of Aniston. Sandler and Aniston then make up a whole new set of lies for Kidman to try and create some sort of Three’s Company feel, but the film finally just collapses under its own weight and ends anti-climactically and predictable.
One of the good things about the movie is that Sandler didn’t drag his entire entourage of terrible actors along for the ride, as he does with most his movies. Though obviously it didn’t do much to rescue the incredible wreck trying to call itself a plot. Just wait, next month the “Soup Nazi” episode will be done with Vin Diesel and Kathy Bates.
Just Go with It is rated PG-13 for suggestive jokes and having to see Decker in a bikini and Swardson in his underwear.
