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The story goes like this.... Mr. Preston Blake, a multimedia gazillionaire dies attempting to scale Mt. Everest. (I defy you to find one member of the audience who wasn’t picturing Bill Gates frozen to the summit, snickering quietly to themselves.) All of his fortunes fall to an unsuspecting heir, Longfellow Deeds a small town pizza parlour owner. Shenanigans and goings-on ensue when Deeds leaves home for a few days to come to the big apple, and inherit his windfall.
Winona Ryder (Heathers, Girl, Interrupted) plays Deed’s love interest Babe Bennett. Her talents are TOTALLY wasted here, as the script never does anything with this character, save for making her entirely one-dimensional and puerile. The thought of getting to watch Ryder stretch her comedic legs was intriguing enough to get me through the doors of the theatre. The terrible role she found herself in made me sorry to see her lessen herself. Ryder is a talent, a unique and distinctive actress whom Sandler should be worshiping right now as she is the ONLY thing in this movie giving it any class whatsoever. I have been told that I’m opinionated. That’s certainly true in that I know exactly what I like. I enjoy originality. I favour directors who use their stars to their full potential. I don’t endorse projects that take movies that don’t need remaking, update them, and dumb them down to a level where they assume they’ll be palatable. Anyone who needs anything sharpened may want to consider paying Gary Cooper’s grave a visit as he’s most likely spinning at a rate to sharpen the dullest of butter knives to steak quality. Too bad he wasn’t around to do the same for the script. My opinion of Sandler’s talents being minuscule is becoming more and more entrenched the more I see of his work. Don’t waste your time on this one.
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Watching
Adam Sandler (The Wedding Singer, Big Daddy) I was reminded
of my theatre-going experience watching Titanic. In
Titanic
I sat perplexed as a cinema full of teenage girls cried their eyes out
over Leonardo DiCaprio and wished that the movie would go on forever. (As
Celine Dion’s theme song seemed to.) I couldn’t get out of the theatre
fast enough. (This is partly due to the fact that the movie was bad, and
also partly to do with the fact that there was a lynch mob of colour co-ordinated
14 year olds was forming to have “like some words” with me for laughing
during Leo’s death scene.) Like my alienation at Titanic, my experience
at Mr. Deeds was one of Invasion of the Body Snatchers eeriness.
I was in a theatre full of people laughing hysterically at things that
were just....not funny. I counted the number of times I laughed at something
Sandler said or did in the 105 minutes I will never get back again: 3.
I’m not terribly financially inclined but it seems to me that one laugh
every 35 minutes is not quite a lot of bang for your buck.