A warm romantic comedy after a very quesy start

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2008)

It's a good thing I stuck with this movie as the first 15 or so minutes (really, up until the love story starts and we see the lovely/always cute Drew Barrymore appear) are just awful. In fact, I considered switching channels when this was shown on commercial TV the other week. The reason it was so bad? The comedy was pitched at a level suitable for primary school children. Perhaps that is the norm for Adam Sandler comedies (I don't watch movies with him in it merely for the fact that he is in it...hence I haven't seen too many Sandler movies). It's as if Sandler, perhaps, didn't trust the script and insisted on low-brow, juvenile prat-falls and gross out humour be included. If it was intended to appeal to kids, then it is very surprising that in one scene Sandler's character Henry drops the "F bomb" in front of some primary school aged kids. The "F" word isn't really suitable for kids, you wouldn't think...and a love story might not appeal to them either.
So, if I had bailed on the movie early on, I'd have been forced to rate it 0 stars or a very generous 1 star. Fortunately, I soldiered on and the movie changed in nature...into something more watchable.
The premise of the movie has "high concept" written all over it: it draws on an actual medical condition-one in which a person has no longer any long term memory. To explain: just imagine that you get a knock to the head one day and you wake up the next day not being able to remember anything new-not after a while in any case. So, you could remember what you already knew before the knock to the head, but nothing afterwards...well, you could, but you'd forget it after a few short hours or whathaveyou.
So, serial womaniser and liar Henry Roth (Adam Sandler), has to try and woo a woman who he finds irresistible but who can't remember any positive impressions he has made the day before...or even remember him.
This movie has its heart in the right place. Not exactly plausible but nonetheless charming and at times poignant, mainly due to the lovely Barrymore. It's a rom-com, so criticising it for not being plausible is a tad ungenerous.