I can never hate Adam Sandler as much as I should. Grown Ups was greeted with howls of rage more befitting to the end of Western civilisation, but I kind of liked the way it ambled aimlessly. Just Go With It was widely despised but I found it amusing, and it takes a certain chutzpah to mine laughs from something as corny as a fake German accent in this day and age. Sandler is basically a con-man; he’s discovered he can make comedies without any semblance of shape or coherence and still find an audience, so he uses that. He’s like a street-vendor hawking trinkets that fall apart in your hands. The work is shoddy, but at least it’s honestly shoddy; no-one’s pretending it’s designer fare.
All that said, you need to go into Jack and Jill with the knowledge that it’s one of the worst films of 2011. In fact, it shouldn’t be seen in the cinema at all; no way should you pay 8 Euros for this thing. If, however, you chance to catch it on TV, six months or a year from now, you may find something soothing – or just brain-numbing – in its loose, almost random structure. It’s a bit like what critic Pauline Kael once wrote about Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, with the obvious and important proviso that this film and Way Out West belong not just on different planets, but in different galaxies: “You adjust to a different rhythm and come out feeling relaxed, as if you’d gone on vacation.”
Sandler is both Jack and Jill, a high-flying advertising executive and his twin sister who comes for Thanksgiving and decides to stay on (and on). Jill lives alone in New York (Jack is in LA), seemingly with no job, no friends and no life. She’s never used a computer. She’s loud, brassy and high-maintenance, arriving at the airport with a dozen suitcases – “better to have it and not need it,” she opines, sounding more like a Jewish mother than a sister – and a cockatoo named Poopsie. She’s rude about the furniture, Jack’s adopted Indian son and a homeless man they’ve invited for Thanksgiving. She’s physically gross and repulsive. “It’s not you, it’s the chimichangas!” she wails as the film lets fly with one of its (many) fart jokes.
Everyone knows what’s going to happen, of course: Jack will resist, he’ll rant and rave, but he and Jill will finally bond because family values blah blah blah, blood is thicker than water blah blah blah. The jaw-dropping thing is how lazy the film is, setting up Jill as the houseguest from hell then just riffing randomly. Now she’s on a pony. Now she’s in the pool, on a jet-ski. Now she’s a contestant on TV’s The Price is Right. Now Jack and Jill are jumping rope together. Now we go off on a Mexican family picnic, complete with toothless grandma, kids named Jose and borderline-tasteless illegal immigrant gags (the Mexican host says he likes to think of his late wife “sneaking into Heaven”). Now Al Pacino sings. Now John McEnroe turns up, railing against atheists.
Al Pacino? John McEnroe? The latter’s just a cameo, one of many famous names doing walk-on appearances – but the former has a proper role (albeit ‘as himself’), implausibly falling for Jill even when she snubs his advances and breaks his only Oscar. It’s weird seeing Pacino giving so much to this role – he really gets into it – just as it’s weird seeing the bookend bits with real-life twins talking earnestly about their relationships (even if some of their lines are clearly scripted by the same cretins who wrote the movie: “We used to be triplets, but he ate the third one!”). Why are these people trying so hard? Don’t they know it’s an Adam Sandler joint, a cesspool of blatant mediocrity and Dunkin’ Donuts product-placement? Over to you, haters.
DIRECTED BY Dennis Dugan
STARRING Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes, Al Pacino
US 2011 91 mins
