Meh

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2004)

Watching 50 First Dates is about as funny as watching your grandma suffer from Alzheimer's. The main problem is that a film about short-term memory loss is more heart-wrenching than amusing, and the fact that 50 First Dates is being marketed as a light-hearted romantic comedy is more than somewhat deceiving.
Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) is a veterinarian at an aquarium in Hawaii with commitment phobia who manages to bed attractive and naive female tourists every night of the week.
Then he meets cute and quirky Lucy (Drew Barrymore) at a local diner.

Apparently captivated by the way she builds houses out of her waffles, he is smitten. Likewise, she is smitten by his hands that smell like fish, because her dad was a fisherman.
Henry and Lucy plan on meeting the following morning for breakfast.
However, when Henry shows up the next day and greets her by asking her to smell his fishy hands. She baffles him by calling him a pervert. We soon learn that a year ago on her father's birthday, Lucy was in a car crash that caused her to lose her short-term memory.
Each night when she goes to bed, she wakes up to remember nothing of the previous day, but remembers everything up until the time of the accident. Apparently, short-term memory loss works like clockwork.
Lucy wakes up every morning thinking it's her father's birthday and proceeds to start out every day the same way, even in the same outfit.

It must get pretty old for Lucy's family and friends seeing her wear the same pink T-shirt and white Capri pants every day. Her loving and protective father (Blake Clark) and little brother (Sean Astin) try to perfectly recreate each day. The two even go so far as to order hundreds of the daily newspapers that came out the day of her accident for her to read every morning.
It's unlikely that someone who was as commitment-phobic as Henry suddenly wants to marry someone without a memory like Lucy, cute as she is. He talks her family into being open with her about her memory loss by setting up a tape of the past year's events for her to watch as soon as she wakes up. Lucy cries every morning as Henry consoles her. Sounds like fun.
Sandler and Barrymore do have good chemistry together during their 50 first dates and 50 first kisses. It's the same chemistry that made the pairing work well enough in The Wedding Singer. Sean Astin provides some pretty funny scenes as Lucy's little brother who has a steroid problem and lisp.
However, the audience could mostly do without Henry's pot-head best friend, played by Rob Schneider, who has a terrible Hawaiian accent and wears impossibly short shorts.
The way Henry uses the aquarium animals to woo Lucy (including dressing up some kind of penguin in a floral shirt to sit in the middle of a road as Lucy speeds by in her Jeep) would surely have his management calling PETA, but that's overlooked.
While 50 First Dates has the feel of an ultimately serious movie, it still relies on juvenile humor such as walrus vomit and genitalia to appeal to Sandler's fans. For those looking for a light-hearted comedy like the commercials for 50 First Dates advertise, you may be getting into more than you bargained, unless you find tragic brain-damage amusing.