272.
Just Go With It
7/10
My youth was filled with Adam Sandler movies such as Happy Gilmour and The Waterboy, just to name a couple but let's be brutally honest, the guy's comedies had taken a steep decline over the last decade. I loved the earlier stuff but my favourite Sandler film came a little later on. Reign on Me is a great great movie in my eyes and is a far cry from his usual comedy work, but that is a different conversation for another day. Just Go With It was recommended to me whilst climbing the Pantheon in Athens on my first day of travelling around Europe a few years ago. It's taken me a while to get around to it and when I typed 'J' in the Netflix search, it was there staring back at me. The movie also stars Jennifer Anniston and although I was a little late to the party in watching the complete series of Friends, she is such a recognisable face she's not exactly going to be just a side character. Let's find out whether the title of the movie is a cry to the audience on what we should do whilst we watch!
The movie begins with a wedding day and Sandler's character Danny is about to get married. In the bridal suite, the bride is talking about how she has been cheating on Danny and gave it one more night before the wedding to get it out of her system for now. Danny overhears this, along with his best friends, and walks out. In a bar, he sits as an attractive woman walks in and after seeing his wedding ring, she asks about his wife. He explains that she left him for another man and he ends up sleeping with this woman. This is the ploy for the next 23 years as he creates fictitious failed marriages, dead wives and divorces as he sleeps his way through the women. That's until he meets a girl he likes and sleeps with her without his wedding ring. The next morning she finds the ring in his pocket and shit hits the fan as she won't date someone who is married as this caused the breakdown in her own parent's relationship. This highly attractive female named Palmer has taken Danny by surprise and now he needs to act. The only person who knows his schemes would be his co-worker Katherine, played by Anniston. She is divorced, a mother of two and Danny's new best friend. They know everything about each other and it clicks with me, these two are going to end up together. Don't worry about Palmer, she's just a ploy for the audience and I've seen enough Sandler movies to know which road we are heading down.
Sandler even has to pretend that Katherine's kids are his own and after buying her loads of new clothes to act as a trophy wife, they all meet Palmer. The son blackmails Danny into taking them all to Hawaii on vacation where they all bond as best possible.
Danny's mate from the beginning comes along to pretend to be Katherine's new boyfriend. As the vacation carries on Palmer finds a way to get Danny to spend quality time with, what she thinks is, his kids but little does she know that this begins to work against her. He bonds with them, teaching the boy to swim and Katherine sees this and the camera pans in on both females individually to show that they are attracted to this new fathering Danny. Danny and Katherine even end up having a meal together all because Katherine meets an old school friend that was a bit of a bitch to her. She needs Danny to lie and pretend that they are both married, spiralling in to even more lies.
You can see them both enjoy each other's company and towards the end of the night, the audience is left wondering if they would kiss but they walk away. In each of their rooms, they actually decide to head back towards each other's floor in the hotel, only for Danny to bump into Palmer and somehow they get talked into getting married the next day. Katherine comes out of the elevator doors to find out the news and then take the ride back to her room. The two are left to sleepless nights wondering if something needs to be said but instead we wait until the morning. Katherine speaks to her old 'friend' and admits that she was lying about her own life and that she has fallen in love with Danny. The thing is that Danny was actually standing behind her and admits to stopping the wedding. He has begun to feel exactly the same and enjoys his time with her kids, already feeling like they are a family. The move ends rather quickly from here on out as it shows the two in their wedding day, embracing each other as another scene shows Palmer on a flight getting along with Andy Roddick the famous tennis player, which came from absolutely nowhere.
I have definitely taken my eye off the ball when it comes to Adam Sandler movies. You hear the bad things about some of his comedies in the last ten years and decide to stay away with good reason. I haven't gotten around to the much newer, more serious roles that he's been playing but as mentioned in the beginning, when there's a bit more seriousness, I sit up and take notice. This is no difference here and it feels like some of his older more popular comedy style mixed with a sense of adulthood about him. Maybe he's finally realising what he does well and leaves the nonsensical storyline behind. Yes, the story was extremely predictable and indeed felt like some other rom-com movies from the past twenty years but it still came with a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction with how the story played out by the end. The main difference from all the rest would be the love triangle that emerged. Although we knew how it would play out, it was still interesting to watch a movie where the main female you expect the male to chase down starts to drop back into the shadow and you feel yourself willing the character on to head towards someone else. Little did I know that this was based on Cactus Flower, which was a comedy movie from the late 60s' which revolves around the same kind of story.
For me, Sandler was back to 50 First Dates level of comedy. He had a crude style mixed with real emotion of certain characters which I've heard has been missing from many flops that he had put his name to recently. Jennifer Anniston has only ever been Rachel Green to me but to see her in another role, playing a female who hides her beauty and body rather than flaunting it in Friends, it was a different direction to what I'd seen from her usual role. This gives the audience a sense of compassion and wanting her to 'get the win' as she is shit out of luck herself but slowly falls for her best friend, who is treating her kids like the father she wants them to have, all whilst watching him try to get with a younger model. I'm more than willing to give some honourable mentions to Bailee Madison and Griffin Gluck who played the kids. They were absolute terrors and downright arseholes at the right time but played their roles very well. There was even time in the movie for some short scenes with the Sandler posse of actors that you used to see in every Sandler movie over the years. Even if it was only for a minute, you recognised the faces.
My next Adam Sandler movie is going to be Uncut Gems, which will be a different direction from what I have just watched here but I know the guy has variety in his catalogue. I'm not sure what else to add other than it was nice to see the comedic storyline reigned in, to an extent, rather than Sandler trying to play two characters of opposite sexes for example. Playing it nice and simple shows that he can still be a decent hit from time to time and it was nice to see the Anniston still has it in the locker. Hopefully, Netflix has helped Sandler's career more than most will notice and we get some more movie that pass a couple of hours on a rainy day.
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