It’s been over ten years since a live-action Adam Sandler movie made over $100 million at the domestic box office. In large part, this is due to Sandler opting out of the box-office race entirely, having signed a series of deals with Netflix to put out movies from his Happy Madison production company straight to the streamer – a savvy business decision that he struck well before many other stars and companies made similar ones, which seems to have allowed him more time and means to star in some more ambitious movies on the side. (His one recent major live-action release, Uncut Gems, was an A24 movie that, as it happened, outgrossed several of his 2010s comedies!) Counterintuitively, Sandler’s mass-appeal comedies have even started to improve on streaming, which has not been true of many other stars. Improbable but true: The Week Of, Murder Mystery, and Leo are some of his funniest movies in years.
They’re probably not, however, his most popular. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it’s also difficult for any Netflix title to compete with the staying power of Sandler’s last big pre-streaming hits: the Grown Ups movies, both of which have made themselves fixtures on the Max Top 10 charts for the past week. Yes, with nearly a dozen Sandman vehicles of various sizes and shapes to choose from on Netflix, at least part of his audience is still opting for the largely formless adventures of Lenny (Sandler) and his childhood pals. Rotten Tomatoes surely isn’t the final word on these things, but it is striking that even by Sandler’s standards, these things are critically loathed: Only 10% of the reviews of Grown Ups (2010) are positive, while Grown Ups 2 (2013) only mustered 8%. Higher than Jack & Jill, but not by much.
Why these movies, then? Other stuff from Sandler’s hack period, like Click or Jack & Jill, may be dumb, but they have high concepts at their core: A remote control that can be used to fast-forward, rewind, or pause life! Or, in the case of the deranged but occasionally very funny Jack & Jill: Two Sandlers! (Plus Al Pacino, in a performance he reportedly refuses to discuss.) The concept behind Grown Ups is basically this: Here’s Sandler and the guys he was friends with on SNL on summer break, only with Kevin James swapped in for Chris Farley (a dynamic Sandler essentially confirmed in his very sweet tribute song for Farley on his most recent stand-up special). Grown Ups 2 goes even lighter on plot; it opens by revealing that Lenny and his pals have moved back to their hometown, where they’re treated like all-purpose homecoming kings and/or honorary mayors. The movie just follows them around on the last day of school, though they seem to be on summer break all year long.
For fans of Sandler’s SNL years, this does have a clear high-school-reunion appeal. For years, Sandler, David Spade, Chris Rock, and Rob Schneider did little cameos in each other’s movies, but rarely actually co-starred together. Grown Ups 2 ups the ante from the first movie’s reunion vibes by setting a record for the number of SNL cast members appearing in a single film. For the record, that’s 17: Sandler, Spade, Rock, Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, Colin Quinn, Jon Lovitz, Ellen Cleghorne, Melanie Hutsell, Cheri Oteri, Taran Killam, Will Forte, Paul Brittain, Bobby Moynihan, and Loney Islanders Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer. Hilariously, Schneider is absent, his real-life spat with Sandler lending some verisimilitude to all of the bullying japes that pass between the guys in the movie. (They’ve since patched things up, paving the way for A Grown Ups Hanukkah.)
It’s also instructive to take a look at what was happening in comedy around the time of the Grown Ups movies’ original release. Sandler’s old pal (and roommate!) Judd Apatow changed the landscape of movie comedy with The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005, and while Sandler was still notching plenty of hits, he was arguably losing some ground to the interconnected likes of Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen. The Grown Ups movies (which shared release years with movies like The Other Guys, Anchorman 2, Date Night, and This Is the End) feel like an answer to those Apatow-era ensemble pictures where a bunch of funny guys riff off of each other incessantly. (Sandler’s own collaboration with Apatow from that era, Funny People, is more about that compulsion, and pokes fun at the high-concept silliness of stuff like Click.) Happy Madison movies aren’t known for their improv, but that technique would go a long way toward explaining both the weakness of the endlessly traded insults between the Grown Ups guys, and the fact that Sandler and company seem to be genuinely cracking each other up in multiple scenes. There’s a whole bit with the guys saying “maze” over and over to make fun of Rob Schneider saying it instead of “corn.” That’s the joke. Guys sayin’ “maze.” In terms of how this competes with Apatow, just imagine that scene in The Simpsons where Homer comes across a group of Teamsters and they engage him in a laziness competition. Then subtract the Teamsters.
But even when these movies represent the worst, laziest, treacliest, and most bullying instincts in Sandler’s brain – seriously, there’s also a bit in Grown Ups 2 where Maya Rudolph angrily hectors a woman for looking too mannish – there’s something almost experimental about Sandler making a hang-out movie where nothing much of consequence happens and even the big comic set pieces seem pretty half-assed. There’s obviously a 1980s Caddyshack/Animal House influence on Sandler’s work, and Grown Ups 2 in particular plays like a snobs-versus-slobs comedy where the slobs already won before the movie even started.
Yet for all the fantasy elements of Grown Ups 2 populating an entire town almost exclusively with SNL alumni and other Sandler buddies, it’s not a fantasy that Sandler has really followed through on. Sure, his guys still pop up in various movies, especially those early Netflix ones like The Ridiculous 6. But for the majority of the past decade, Sandler has been branching out. Even comedies like The Week Of and Murder Mystery aren’t as packed with Sandler-world figures. There may be someday be a re-reunion via a third Grown Ups, but at the moment, those movies have become a little easier to like, or at least shrug off, because they look more like Sandler affectionately bidding his worst instincts a fond farewell.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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