Pretty good, all in all

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2005)

In spite of some bad reviews I decided to watch this because I thought it would be more like Sandler's one good movie, The Wedding Singer, and my instincts were right. This does have much of the same tone as that movie, although it's marred by some of the cartooniness that makes most Sandler movies intolerable.
I like the premise, which falls somewhere between Groundhog's Day and Clean Slate, as Sandler has to make a girl with short term memory loss re-fall in love with him every day. While I find it hard to accept Sandler as a lady's man (I also find it hard to accept him as a phenomenally successful actor, so I guess I'm out of sync with the American public), he and Barrymore have a good chemistry that makes it work.
What keeps this film from working as well as Wedding Singer is the aforementioned cartooniness, represented by Ula, who seems to fall into the category of, "if someone's really ugly and has a weird accent then they should be ridiculed" and pathetic bodybuilder Doug. These characters feel completely out of place amidst the movie's low-key charm, as though they wandered in from one of Sandler's low comedies.
There is something generally unfocused about the movie. It can also be seen in an odd throwaway shot of the auto accent, which adds absolutely nothing to the movie, like the character of Ula. Wedding Singer had a very definite vision of what it was going for and Dates suffers from a lack of that vision. But it is moderately amusing and rather sweet, so all in all it's a good movie. 7/10