Gross-out humor makes this story quickly waste away

Rating: 4/10 (14 February 2004)

Adam Sandler can have a certain charm that helps him to carry a movie. We especially saw this in Punch-Drunk Love, but also to a lesser extent in The Wedding Singer where he starred alongside Drew Barrymore, who not so coincidentally is his co-star in 50 First Dates, the latest in Sandler comedy.
The premise is something like this: Sandler plays Henry Roth, a philandering marine veterinarian in Hawaii who happens to meet and fall in love with a girl named Lucy (played by Barrymore). He's excited and with a moment's notice pretty much ready to drop everything he had going in life up to this point. Only thing is, the next day Lucy doesn't even remember Henry. As we soon find out (if we hadn't already from the trailer and talk all over the internet), Lucy has no short term memory and every time she falls asleep, she forgets all that happened in the previous day. What's more, her father and steroid-obsessed brother with a lisp (played by Sean Astin) make sure that Lucy doesn't realize that she has this short term memory loss, so every day they go through the same actions as all the days before just to help out their sister who won't remember it anyway. If this sounds interesting, it could be, but read on...
The promise that such an idea holds is quickly wasted amongst the gross out humor that Sandler's movies (with the exception of the two I mentioned at the outset of this review) hold. We have a pretty serious thing going on here in Lucy's life and humor about Walrus testicles, she-women, projectile vomit, and wet dreams mixed in. It's really quite a distasteful mix. The scene where Henry finds out about Lucy's condition is just plain bad as well. It's delivered as some kind of giant surprise complete with flashbacks and the like, like you would see in some kind of suspense movie. But of course all seriousness is quickly lost.
The performances of Sandler and Barrymore are good. As comedies go, they make one of the better on-screen couples to be found. It's just the presence of all the other actors around them that screws things up. Most minor characters in the story possess absolutely horrid acting skills and quickly throw off the level of believability.
Honestly, the conclusion to 50 First Dates could have been pretty powerful had it not been for the 90 minutes of the movie that preceded it. If this movie was handled differently, it could have been a good one. But in the hands of those who made 50 First Dates, it certainly wasn't.
4 out of 10.