What do Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Memento, and Groundhog Day have in common?

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2004)

Well, nothing really, but if you mix them all together you get this movie. Sandler and Barrymore delivered a wonderful romantic comedy with The Wedding Singer, the vast success of which made me more than a little skeptical about whether or not they could successfully play different characters than they played in that movie and still be convincing as they fall in love again. And again. And again. And again.
The psychological realism of Lucy Whitmore's (Barrymore) problem is beside the point. We already know that short term memory loss doesn't happen on a daily schedule, let's not split hairs here. The point is that her 'condition' (a great homage could have been made if it had been described that way in the movie at some point, by the way) provides a constantly re-booting stream of possibilities for Adam Sandler to act cute and make us all grin ('Sorry I'm not better looking') as he tries to stop being the gigolo that he is at the beginning of the movie and tries desperately to find a way to make Lucy fall in love with him permanently.
If you can get past the requirement that you have to believe that any character played by Adam Sandler is a womanizer, then you're well on your way to enjoying the movie. Sandler puts in sort of a mixture of his traditional roles, which tend to include either a lot of sarcasm and anger and fart jokes if he's in a sophomoric comedy like Billy Madison or Big Daddy, or a hopeless and lovable romantic, desperate for affectionate attention but unable to communicate his intentions with women. And while there is plenty of gross out in the movie (consider a scene, for example, where Sandler's co-worker, Jennifer, who is a gross-out ploy him/herself, is covered from head to toe in the flying vomit of a gleeful walrus), Sandler's character pretty much sticks to his determination to win Lucy's heart for more than one day at a time. Yes, there is discussion about walruses having the largest penises in the animal kingdom, but is that really important when you have scenes like the one where Lucy and Henry (Sandler) both catch each other dancing in joy about their first successful encounter in the restaurant in the beginning of the movie?
Of course the typical Sandler cast members are all here. The incomprehensible coach from The Waterboy plays the part of Lucy's protective father, Rob Schneider, as usual, plays distantly below his comedic abilities as a goofy character who wears too-short shorts and has discolored eyes and a bad accent, and Dan Aykroyd also makes a clever cameo appearance, while Sean Astin delivers yet another embarrassing performance as Lucy's insecure and bulky brother with an extreme lisp. It is indeed strange and unfortunate to observe what happens to child stars when they stop being cute.
The movie makes clever use of videotape to remind Lucy every day of who that guy is in her bed with her, and makes a pretty charming conclusion to her ultimate, and necessary, decision that it's not fair for Henry to have to put up with reminding her who he is every day. The major problem with the movie, however, is that it suffers from the confliction of the characteristics of the character we're supposed to like. This is exactly why Bad Santa didn't work, we were supposed to root for a guy who literally had not a single solitary redeeming value.
The movie starts off by showing what Henry Roth's (Sandler) daily life is like, living on a tropical island and routinely bedding sexy tourist women looking for some horizontal accompaniment during their vacation. As he's trying to rid himself of a beautiful woman, he tells her that he's a secret agent who must avoid her for her own protection. Sure, the piece worked pretty well by itself in the theatrical trailer, but when it's attached to the rest of the movie it presents Henry not only as an un-trustable womanizer, but it also makes him out to be a complete moron to think that any girl with a thought in her head would buy such a nutty story. Character change is important, but it doesn't have to be from one extreme to the other.
The result of combining this character with the much more interesting story of Lucy's memory disorder is a romantic comedy that's not as funny as a more deliberate, low-brow Sandler movie, and barely romantic at all. Lucy's memory disorder could have provided the premise for a far superior movie had it been made as a drama and without Adam Sandler. It's as if Sandler wandered onto the set of a dramatic film about her problem and he turned it into this. The interactions that Lucy has with her family, and especially the palpable care that her father clearly has for her certainly deserve a better movie. It tries to do too many different things and ends up doing none of them well.