'Just Go With It' is Typical Sandler Cinema Fare

There’s really only one thing that you can expect from an Adam Sandler movie: potty humor. Dennis Dugan’s “Just Go With It” certainly delivers that—plus a number of other quirks that border on the impressively absurd, even for a Sandler flick.

Sandler plays Danny Maccabee—Jewish characters being another Sandler staple—a plastic surgeon whose past encounter with heartbreak has turned him from an honest, charming dork into a rather manipulative womanizer. When Danny finds himself smitten by an adorable schoolteacher Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), he ends up constructing a fake ex-family to try and win her over. He enlists his loyal assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to pose as his soon-to-be ex-wife. Katherine herself is a single mom, and before she knows it, Danny has embroiled her kids in his web of lies, and the whole group is off to Hawaii for a weekend to remember.

If the plot sounds almost arbitrary, that’s because it is. The movie presents a string of random and semi-amusing events that don’t pretend to be anything remotely resembling a logical story progression. “Just Go With It” is aiming for chuckles, not coherence.

In Hawaii, Katherine’s children carry a significant amount of the film’s weight. Michael (Griffin Gluck) is a shy but bold six-year-old, and Gluck manages to project an amusing combination of cuteness and intimidation. His older sister Maggie (Bailee Madison of “Brothers”) is an eccentric, wannabe actress with a flair for the dramatic. These well-realized performances by relative unknowns provide much of the charm of the film, and leave surprisingly little pressure on the shoulders of its older co-stars.

In “Just Go With It,” Aniston plays somewhat against type, with a role that is a bit more slapstick than much of her prior work. As Katherine, the overworked divorcée who hasn’t worn heels in years, she does more with physical humor than with dialogue—from crotch-punching and hula-dancing to swan-diving and swimsuit-modeling—to hold the audience’s attention. In this fashion, Aniston’s usual girl-next-door charm is replaced by a badass attitude and some straightforward sex appeal. Sandler, on the other hand, plays the same character viewers have come to expect, from the scatological humor to the on-the-nose physical comedy.

The most unexpected performance in “Just Go With It” is undoubtedly that of Nicole Kidman, who plays dramatically against her traditional Hollywood persona. As Aniston’s ditzy ex-sorority sister, Devlin, she appears in four lengthy scenes of obsessive nose-nuzzling and serious hip-shaking. While it’s hard to judge the quality of the act, this is definitely a Kidman audiences have never seen before, and the performance does grab one’s attention; whether or not it’s the perverse appeal of watching a train wreck in progress is for the individual viewer to decide.

Though it would be the understatement of the century to call the film’s ending predictable—guess who ends up falling in love with whom!—writers Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling pull off the expected with some surprisingly adept romantic dialogue. Of course, this sensitivity is balanced out by some of the script’s slightly racist and sexually offensive segments, which include everything from a incompetent Latina babysitter to a flamboyant gay hairdresser.

For Sandler fans who enjoy the likes of “Click” and “Mr. Deeds,” “Just Go With It” will not disappoint; as far as Sandler movies go, it’s safe to call this one a success. At the same time, for those who eschew slapstick, no review is really needed to suggest that this film will most likely bore and offend more refined cinematic sensibilities. “Just Go With It” is, in other words, just what one would expect.