A little less of the usual Sandler shtick would have helped

Rating: 7/10 (27 July 2004)

Let's make one thing perfectly clear. I am not an Adam Sandler fan. If it is within my power to avoid seeing Adam Sandler on the big screen, small screen, or on the cover of People Magazine, then I do so at all costs. The problem is that I have this girlfriend. She loves to watch Adam Sandler movies. Then again, my girlfriend will watch just about any film slapped onto a DVD and put into a case. She truly believes that if it says on the cover 'hilarious and uproarious' it must be so because they wouldn't print false advertisement since the manufacturer could be sued. Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit but only a little bit. Anyway, the first Adam Sandler film I saw was The Waterboy, a film many found to be 'hilarious and uproarious' I found it to be 'stupid and idiotic cinematic crapola.' From that point in time, I vowed to cleanse my soul by making it my life's mission to never occupy the same room if there was even a whiff of Adam Sandler strutting across the TV screen. Until last night, except for one bout with Mr. Deeds, I had pretty much succeeded in that regard, but then my world caved in again. Having been to the theater three times this week without her (she was working so don't blast me), the aforementioned girlfriend insisted I sit and watch a film of her choosing. Her choosing was 50 First Dates, a film she had borrowed from a co-worker. Catastrophe! And worst yet, co-starring Rob Schneider! Yech! Well maybe I could fall asleep and she wouldn't notice. Then again, Drew Barrymore was also in it and I loved her in E.T. and loved her in Firestarter when she was doing that really cool fire trick with her brain so maybe I wouldn't suffer too much.
True to form, the early part of 50 First Dates is typical Adam Sandler/Rob Schneider shtick. Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) is a Hawaii Veterinarian who talks to his animals like Dr. Doolittle, and is heavy into one night stands with female tourists. To avoid having them become attached and want to stay in Hawaii with him he tells them stuff like he's a secret agent getting ready to go on a mission. So supposedly every female tourist that vacations in Hawaii is a dumb bimbo which they would have to be to fall for such nonsense. It wasn't funny and I was suffering already.
Henry's best friend and hanger on, Ula (Rob Schneider) comes to see Henry whenever he needs stitched up after having had a shark take a bite out of him. He also comes to see Henry hoping that Henry will relate every detail of his one night stands to him, because Ula's wife just doesn't do it for him anymore. Ula also brings along his brood of kids. As it turns out, the kids are cute, Ula is surprisingly funny, so are the kids, and my pain eases a bit.
Then there's Henry's assistant Alexa (Lusia Strus). She looks like Cloris Leachman had just made a wrong turn from the set of Young Frankenstein and ended up in the wrong movie. Her jokes are bad, we've seen the ugly assistant bit before and done much better, and then a Walrus pukes on her and I'm back wallowing in my misery once again. Soon Henry is having breakfast in a diner that specializes in spam and eggs so that later on we can have a few spam jokes thrown our way. It is then that he spots Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore) making a house out of her waffles. He puts the moves on her, they have a nice conversation, Henry is attracted to her as a person and not as a bimbo, there's a funny guy sitting at the counter, the people that run the restaurant are kind of funny, and it looks like things are back on track. It's only a temporary reprieve though because when Henry goes back to the diner to meet her the next morning he finds out that she wakes up every day not remembering what happened the day before. This time when he tries to make hay with her, he fails and once again the film goes astray as we get scene after scene after scene of Henry meeting Lucy in the diner or down the road trying to get her to notice him so that they can have another first date. The sequences are totally done for slapstick, not remotely funny, and although we can sympathize with Henry's motives the low brow comedy just doesn't fit in with what he is trying to achieve or what the story is really about. Eventually Henry meets Lucy's father Marlin (Blake Clark) and her brother Doug (Sean Astin). There is a funny yet touching sequence where we see Lucy coming home and Marlin and Doug have to relive the same day over and over again because if Lucy finds out she loses her memory everyday, she becomes traumatized.
As you can tell the film is all over the place. There are times when it's a very well done sweet romantic comedy, with a lot of heart. At other times, it seems to want to sink back into the usual ineptness of low-brow films like The Waterboy. Eventually, in the latter part of Fifty First Dates, the comedy low-jinks do subside for the most part and the film seems to get on track. A lot of this can be attributed to Drew Barrymore who gives a very sensitive portrayal of a woman trapped by circumstances beyond her control. Whenever she is on the screen, the film lifts itself up about ten notches. Despite my earlier comments, I have always felt Barrymore was often underrated in the acting department. Her problem is she picks some lousy scripts with which to display that talent. Sandler however eventually tones down his shtick quite a bit, leaving the lowbrow comedy up to Schneider which is where it should have stayed in the first place because most of his lines are the funniest in the film. Likewise, Astin and the rest of the supporting cast are good also, but there's a running joke about body building concerning Doug that continues on way too long and wasn't really necessary at all.
This is the kind of film I find infuriating. There's a wonderfully romantic story, so why did writer George Wing not take that and run with it? Why sink to the idiotic antics that are so unnecessary especially when we've seen that kind of thing from Sandler so many times? When halfway through the film Sandler begins to show how much he does care for Lucy and the steps he takes to help her overcome her desperate plight, it's a side of Sandler we seldom see. He still can't act, as evidenced by his stupidly awful crying scene (at one point he does a fake crying bit, later he cries for real and both are the same), but Lucy and Henry's romance was good enough that we could easily have overlooked his failings.
There was much about 50 First Dates that I enjoyed. There was a large amount of it that I didn't. In the end, I'd have to say that the last half of the film is so good that it's just enough for me to give it a recommendation. Those who love the usual Sandler films will enjoy the first half, and those like me who don't will fall for the second half of the film.
And most of all it has a very nicely well done ending, that kind of touched me and when a film does that I have no choice but to give it my grade. I should probably just give it a C and leave it at that, but since it's an Adam Sandler film I have to grade on the curve and give it a B- but only because the romantic story was so well done, and I'm just a romantic kind of guy. Can't you tell?