Campout camp

An assemblage of Saturday Night Live cast members from the 1990s has pitched in to populate one of the stalest attempts at a buddy comedy to come along in some time. Director Dennis Dugan and longtime collaborator Adam Sandler are joined by Rob Schneider, Chris Rock, David Spade, Steve Buscemi, Norm Macdonald, Tim Meadows and Salma Hayek, among others. The results of their collective efforts are almost entirely humorless.

Beginning in a cartoonish remembered past, the tale centers on the bonds of friendship between a group of friends that form under the tutelage of the local basketball coach, "Buzzer" (Blake Clark). Three decades later, Buzzer has passed away, and his death brings the old team back together again for the funeral. The group of them drag their respective offspring and significant others to a cabin in the woods, and much clichéd midlife bonding and self-realization ensues. This mirthless muddle culminates in an inevitable rematch with the team they bested as children.

Sandler, whose own fame has for the most part dwarfed that of his former colleagues (Rock excepted), plays the one member of the group who has really made good (as an actor, incidentally), and the ironic accuracy of this portrait cannot have been lost on the actor/producer. His benevolence in extending work to his marginalized SNL costars is not repaid with anything resembling inspired performances, however. The keyword here is "lazy." With the exception of Buscemi (who achieves a brief but amusing portrait of a backward yokel), the cast practically yawns their way through the film. They are relaxed in each other's company to an extraordinary degree, but far from coming off as a tight ensemble, they seem uninspired and mildly smug.

The languor and laziness of the players extends to the script (or perhaps is derived from it), which is devoid of considered motivation, sincere warmth or well-crafted jokes. It feels as though the comedians came together and just winged it off the cuff, relying on their sparkling wit and improvisational abilities to deliver the bulk of the laughs. One thing is clear: This aging generation of formerly funny, talented comics has apparently lost a step and is no longer up to the task of killing on command. That attempts at humor are uniformly lowbrow should come as a surprise to no one who is familiar with the careers of Sandler, Spade, Rock and Co. Ultimately, however, it isn't the juvenility of the jokes that bleeds the film of entertainment value but rather their weak and ineffectual nature.

Hackneyed themes regarding the necessity of middle-aged men to surrender to the impotence of their uninspired lives and the necessity of their mates to develop patient understanding for their inadequate husbands dominate the tale. As the film would have it, we're all going to fall short of our dreams and we're all going to get fat, and that's only if we're lucky. It's all about resolving yourself to your fate, whatever it is, and learning to appreciate the scraps of happiness you manage to piece together. That none of this is funny just adds to the general tedium. Grown Ups is less an all-star review than a sad document of waning talents and commercial concerns. 

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com