Grown Ups

By now, most people realize that Adam Sandler likes to vacation with his friends, and most of his movies are vehicles for him to do this and have a movie company pick up the tab. You also know, by watching many of these entries, that you are going to get a lot of slapstick humor, sometimes raunchy, and some messed up gender tropes in the process. And sometimes, there’s a good lesson mixed in there, just to mess with you.

All of that’s true in this one.

For this outing, Sandler teams up with Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider as they were all part of the same high school basketball team back in the day that won the championship against a rival school. Lenny (Adam Sandler) scored the winning shot at the buzzer– the rival school claiming he was on the line and the shot didn’t count.

When the winning coach passes away, it provides an opportunity for these friends, their wives, and children to reunite at a lake house over a weekend, and what ensues is the comedy you’ve come to expect as these adults, who have never really grown up, learn a lot about each other and the simple life.

Be Ready for the Buzzer

Coach Buzzer gives a speech after the big win while everyone is at the lakehouse, and part of that speech is that we all need to be ready for the Buzzer. There is an explicit tie-in there, as we visit each of the friends grown up and each “get to know where they are” vignette ends with the friend hearing that the beloved coach has hit the final buzzer, and they are all called back to their hometown for the funeral.

Each of the friends has to grapple with where their lives have taken them, and throughout the film, there are callbacks to what the friends thought they would do, who they are now, and the regrets that they have. Lenny goes through the most growth, as he’s confronted with a family that seems far from the picture he wants his friends to see. His boys are more interested in first-person shooter video games than simpler things. He has a nanny he’s constantly trying to pass off as a foreign exchange student, and he is making plans without his wife’s input– pretending that she is contributing when he’s already made plans.

The last one drives a come-together moment where all of the friends admit they were all putting on aires and they all reaffirm their friendship and how they should be honest with one another.

Poking Fun at Cultural Norms

It wouldn’t be a Sandler film if there wasn’t any poking at cultural norms. In this one, there are plenty.

Eric (Kevin James) has a wife (Sally, played by Maria Bello) who is breastfeeding their four-year-old son, and you see him calling out for “mom’s milk” until Eric has had enough and has him drink milk from a carton. Multiple gags are had about this son and Sally allowing the son to drink from her breast multiple times throughout the film (though nothing is seen but the boy’s head). She also makes a comment at the water park about how breastfeeding has endowed her with a more attractive figure.

Kurt (Chris Rock) is a stay-at-home dad who cannot get any respect from his family because his pregnant wife has to go to work to make enough to support their family and her mother, and he is awful at cooking. He is constantly belittled for not being the breadwinner in his household, mostly by his mother-in-law, and he takes on a lot of feminine responses to this– probably to balance out Eric and Sally’s relationship.

Marcus (David Spade) plays the main lecher of the group, who is in bed with a woman at the beginning and typifies what many of the men would say they would want, but deep down do not. He seeks to sexualize Rob’s (Rob Schneider) attractive daughters at the water park by finding them skimpy bikinis to wear and leads the men in a cringeworthy scene where they are watching the girl bent over her car in short jean shorts. He’s frequently drunk and is credibly accused of messing with the blond daughter, before the come clean event near the end.

Rob’s big problem is that he’s attracted to older women– significantly older. He’s in his third marriage, and two of his daughters are very attractive and the last looks like him. He also has a hard time not winning a game involving shooting arrows into the sky. He is definitely the weirdest of the bunch, and also one of the more introspective of them.

The Ugly

Being a Sandler film, there is language, though not too over the top. There are some words that are euphemisms used in some circumstances. My biggest complaint in this film is not with the language, it is with the amount of sexual dialog.

This film is crass in many circumstances. The aforementioned scene with the men gazing with lust over the friend’s attractive daughter is one. There are many references to things that Rob and his older wife are going to do. All of the men talk about how much sex they are having with their own wives, and some talk about what happened back in the day.

So, like most Sandler films, if you kept the slapstick and some of the family-appropriate humor, you’d have a story that you wouldn’t mind showing the family. But the language and the sexual banter are what put this in the PG-13 category, and probably would keep most from watching this film.

Purchase this film today!

Grown Ups | DVD