Andy Samberg, Adam Sandler and Susan Sarandon in a scene from “That’s My Boy”Tracy Bennett
Sometimes he makes films, but mainly Adam Sandler makes Adam Sandler comedies, which, when they clock in at a whopping 114 minutes like this classic, will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment but, in either case, requires in appraisal no more than one sentence and, let's pick a round number, 114 seconds of your valuable reading time, so let's get on with it and, for starters …
rest assured that our boy Adam ain't about to mess with his lucrative persona as an infantilized jerk and the king of the good-natured gross-out flick, which, in this incarnation, sees him endowed with an eighties wig and masturbatory habits and a constant can of Bud, the better to shlep through another of those plots whose sole purpose is to find reasons to exhibit bulges in the front of pants and poop in the back, to display arcing streams of pee, to wink at other bodily fluids shot onto tissues or staining a once very white Vera Wang wedding gown, and to apply the venerable art of cinema to the close-up appreciation of the orange spackles in a heaping pile of yellow vomit, all the while surrounding himself with …
supporting cameos from the likes of football coach Rex Ryan, has-been singer Tony Orlando, never-was rapper Vanilla Ice and shouldn't-she-know-better Susan Sarandon, all of whom aid and abet the good-natured gross-out king and further encourage his career-long obsession with …
fatness and fat jokes, which here take the abundant form of a fat black stripper with prosthetic breasts and a really fat marathon man with real breasts and a fat old naked couple making out in a parked car, an obsession that a cleverer critic might put into some Sandlerian psychological context, but not me, who's content to recall this Adam Sandler comedy's most memorable line, "What's it gonna take to make you go away?" and, with the precious seconds ticking down, to remind any readers still reading that …
'nuff said, time's up.