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This time around, Sony’s trailer editors employ tremendously misleading marketing tactics the likes of which have never been seen since a whopping three weeks ago, with The Break-Up providing an equally insufferable ratio of alleged comedy to attempted pathos. The majority of Click’s supposed humor lies in the first forty minutes, as overworked architect Michael Newman (Sandler) continues to shun his family and display fascinating incompetence in the face of multiple remote controls (Nope, that’s the fan! The R/C car! The garage! The toy helicopter opportunely aimed at Adam’s head!). As such, he stomps off to Bed, Bath, & Beyond, where an employee of the Beyond department, Morty (Christopher Walken), provides him with a rather peculiar universal remote with which he can manipulate his life: he can pause, rewind, fast-forward, activate a James Earl Jones commentary, the works.

An amusing notion, sure, but Sandler’s juvenile tendencies are much too hard to suppress and most jokes becomes elaborately telegraphed and subsequently exhausted, as one scene doesn’t just have Michael freezing time to smack his boss (David Hasselhoff), but to then mount his desk and fart in his face. Sigh. The sole character trait of his assistant (Rachel Dratch): she constantly asks to go to the bathroom. Oh, boy. In a touch dusted off over a decade after Billy Madison, there is once more a redheaded bully named O’Doyle begging for his comeuppance (does Sandler have some unresolved childhood issues with such a person?). More often than not, crude replaces clever and the concept wears out quickly. The paper-pretty premise of a workaholic, self-centered man given immense power only to learn how to truly appreciate life is nothing new, especially to scribes Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe (Bruce Almighty). However, whereas Almighty dished out the expected lesson and wrapped up with relative tact, almost the entire second half of Click goes serious and seriously awry as the story decides to go deep into tacky and tedious territory that stops the film dead in its tracks.

The remote begins skipping chunks of Michael’s life for him, leaving him to watch his cozy existence collapse as he gains weight, loses family, and suffers through the shoddiest make-up work ever done by legend Rick Baker, which is not so much shoddily done as it is poor in both context and direction by the screenwriters and Wedding Singer/Waterboy director Frank Coraci (come to think of it, the most impressive make-up is the rather early is-it-or-isn’t-it cameo by Rob Schneider). By the time Sandler is languishing at Daddy’s last goodbye or crawling and bawling in the rain during his own final moments, one wants to relocate the remote the story has so conveniently tossed aside and mash the damn power button. I don’t know what’s in worse taste: the running gag about the family dog humping a stuffed duck, or the most graphic on-screen rape in recent memory, as Sandler and company bend Charles Dickens and Frank Capra over their respective coffins and have no mercy.

Take comfort that at least two things will hold up in the years to come: Nick Swardson’s tombstone and Kate Beckinsale, whose attractiveness virtually compensates for her awkward American accent and constant pout. Once you get past the skepticism that someone like Sandler could land someone like Beckinsale, it becomes apparent that his wife is more of a placeholder than anything, a generic role in a familiar formula that could have been exchanged with any number of actresses in the same way that the lead actor easily could have been as well. Sandler seems to be making an honest effort, but he cannot have his comedic cake and eat it with a dramatic face. His desire for cheap gags only decreases his strength when he tries to tug on the good ol’ heartstrings by the end. Sean Astin and Henry Winkler stall in their attempt to establishes characters during their requisite early appearances before conveniently developing into emotional episodes on the sap side. Hasselhoff depletes his one note of sleaze, while Walken embraces his kooky manner and ends up providing the ensemble’s sole beacon of consistency.

I suppose it’s only appropriate that a movie about a remote pushes so many buttons. The story could easily have been funnier, yet the sap is just insult to injury, going beyond shameless sentimentality to offer an inevitable moral that is not only reheated but wholly unearned. At one point, Sandler looks into a camera and screams, “America, have your laugh. I’m an idiot!” Need I rewind that for you?

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14721&reviewer=409
originally posted: 06/26/06 03:42:57
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