I honestly can’t dislike Adam Sandler as an actor. I have too much affinity for his work on Saturday Night Live and his early 1990s movies (Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore) and his once-in-a-while more substantial work (like Punch-Drunk Love) to let even his most putrid recent movies like Jack & Jill change my mind. But I’ve long realized that the typical “Adam Sandler movies” — the ones that are usually directed by Dennis Dugan, Frank Coraci, or Peter Segal and have cameos for all his friends — seem to be getting progressively worse every year. So whenever I hear a new “Adam Sandler” comedy is on its way I know it probably won’t be my thing.
The worst thing is that the plots seem to get be getting progressively worse — something that the South Park episode AWESOM-O made fun of back in 2004. In that episode Cartman was disguised as a robot (long story) and Hollywood executives decide to use him to develop hundreds of plots for Adam Sandler movies. In case you can’t do math, it’s almost ten years later and Sandler’s movie plots have gotten so bad that he starred in his first sequel this summer, Grown-Ups 2, seemingly because nobody could come up with a worse plot than the plot for Jack & Jill or That’s My Boy.
So even though The Hollywood Reporter describes The Cobbler, a movie that Sandler is currently negotiating to star in, as an “indie drama,” the few plot details sound like the concept is on par with Jack & Jill… or worse. That’s because the plot is described as being about “a shoe man who has the ability to metaphysically step into the lives of the people whose shoes he repairs.”
Even though it will be directed by Tom McCarthy (The Visitor, Win Win), it still sounds too much like something like Click or Bedtime Stories, right? I mean, there’s just too much potential for “metaphysically” to become “let’s dress Sandler up in wacky costumes to imitate the other actors whose shoes he is working on!” It obviously can go either way — but the potential is there for this to be just another Sandler comedy.
Curiously, Sandler has some a really interesting project coming in Jason Reitman‘s family drama Men Women & Children, which could possibly be his best film in years since Reitman’s films are always top notch. He also has a third romantic comedy collaboration with Drew Barrymore, The Familymoon (directed by Frank Coraci… big surprise!) that is currently filming. So to be honest, I don’t know what exactly is going on in Sandler’s career, but I do know that The Cobbler really does sound like a plot AWESOM-O came up with.
What’s the wackiest “Adam Sandler comedy” plot that you can come up with? Let us know in the comments below!
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