Grown Ups (2010)
By Roxanne Downer
What would you get if you took all the melodrama (well, and the Black people) out of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? Grown Ups.
What Grown Ups offers in its stead is a boatload of Saturday Night Live alumni (plus a stand-in for one) reuniting to crack wise and goof around. Adam Sandler and co-writer Fred Wolf cobble together a rough sketch of loosely described characters and scenarios so the gang can get paid for its reunion vacation. Not a bad gig if you can get it.
Those previously mentioned characters include Lenny Feder (Sandler), a successful Hollywood agent with an equally successful fashion-designer wife (Salma Hayek) and two video-game-playing, nanny-texting, Godiva-hot-chocolate-only-drinking brats. When Lenny gets the news of the death of his old coach, who led him and his ragtag buddies to a basketball championship when they were 12, he packs up his current brood, rents a local cabin, and heads back East for the funeral.
There he reunites with the original basketball misfits. Eric (Kevin James), now a lawn furniture salesman, is there with his wife Sally (Maria Bello), who still feeds their “48-month old” breast milk. Kurt (Chris Rock) has become a henpecked husband with two kids and a third on the way with wife Deanne (Maya Rudolph). Rob (Rob Schneider) is a vegan, bead-wearing hippie with a pompadour toupee and a fourth wife old enough to be his mother (Joyce van Patten). Marcus (David Spade), a hard-drinking terminally single lothario, rounds the group out. After the funeral, they all head back to the lakeside cabin to hang out for a long weekend.
That’s it. That’s all the plot you get. The rest of the film’s 102 minutes are spent watching Sandler, Rock, Schneider, Spade, and James poke fun at one another for all the obvious reasons, with Rudolph weighing in every now and again. It’s nice to see these guys back together (even nicer when Colin Quinn, Tim Meadows, and Steve Buscemi join the fun) but it’s difficult to imagine that much of this is scripted–the ad-libbing seems to focus on each of the actor’s unique quirks rather than any character-related information. The barbs, at least, are often funny.
But that’s just the problem. Since the majority of the stars included were the comedic standard bearers of the 1990s, Grown Ups should’ve been much funnier. Their SNL years (roughly 1990-1995) were the only ones anyone of my generation watched with any regularity. Without a script, everything that isn’t a clever one-liner (Rock’s best ones are about his mother-in-law’s toes) sounds pretty sad coming out of the mouths of these once-greats.
For his part, director Dennis Dugan does keep the action moving at a steady pace. The length of this fictional weekend was confusing at times, but I got a clue when someone finally said Fourth of July. Otherwise, the production values–especially during a scene that looked like the most enjoyable water park ever–were solid.
After the credits for Grown Ups rolled and I exited the theatre, my first words to my movie companion were: “Well, that wasn’t about anything.” That’s not to say that the film is completely without its charms, but a story just isn’t one of them.
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This Grown Ups movie review is copyright 2009 Small World Marketing and Shane Rivers. This Grown Ups review should not be reprinted without the permission of the copyright holders.
This movie review of Grown Ups expresses the opinion of the author only. Other Grown Ups movie reviews are available online, and some of those might or might not express different opinions on the movie. Like those other Grown Ups movie reivews, this Grown Ups review is intended for the entertainment and education of the reader. This Grown Ups movie review is provided as is with no warranty or guarantee implied.
[...] Grown Ups – Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Chris Rock, and Rob Schneider all star in this comedy about a group of buddies coming together after many years. [...]