"Eject" your preconceived ideas about Sandler and "Open" your heart ...

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2012)

"Click" is a film made with no other purpose than demonstrating the following statement: "Family comes before work, before everything for that matter" and whether the film features the typical raunchy jokes of Adam Sandler's movies or feels like a rip-off of "Back to the Future" and Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" is almost secondary when you realize at the very end that you're almost convinced about the importance of Family, and not without a fair amount of good jokes, so as a nice little Family film, "Click" delivers its premise.
Now, did we need to be taught that lesson from a film? Did we need another example of a workaholic father who forgets to see his little guy playing his game (it could have as well been the cute little daughter playing the lobster/duck/singing flower in the school play) and jeopardize the harmony of his marriage and family life? Maybe not, but who ever said that all the movies had to bring something new on the screen? And who ever said that being new was a defining element of greatness? Yes, "Click" does feature so many archetypal situations in the beginning that it's hard to be appreciated, and I guess many Sandler haters would have already changed the channel. But once you give "Click" the benefit of the doubt and let the film evolve until the pivotal moment where Michael Newman (yeah, I forgot to name the protagonist) gets the magical remote control from Morty, then it takes off from the ground of stereotypes to build its own bits of originality.
Christopher Walken plays Morty, with the perfect mix of craziness from the kind of character who comes from nowhere and the geeky outfit that makes him look like the hidden nephew of 'Doc' Emmet Brown. Who is Morty? Where does he come from? It doesn't matter since the core of the story is Michael's family life and his ability to use this remote control. On that level, the film would still inspire some suspicion, you would think that with a remote control, he would click on the pause button, increase the size of his wife's boobs (although I wouldn't change nothing on Kate Beckinsale, absolutely sublime in the film) or use it to play in a casino and have some great time. But "Click" never falls in these obvious traps although it allows to have some insights about Michael's menu of life, and some priceless moments involving his parents, played by two TV icons, Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner, totally convincing as the Newmans' grandparents. Other characters provide the necessary reservoir for Sandler's typical jokes, it works, with his boss, played with the towering over-the-top authority of David Hasselhoff, and sometimes, it's just 'meh', like with his assistant/secretary. But all in all, the most crucial use of the magical object will be to 'skip time'.
This notion of 'skipping', so convenient when you want to jump some scenes during a movie, is the plot device that would lead to Michael's nightmare. By skipping all the illnesses, all the arguments with his wife, and all the boring moments spent with his Family, kids and parents, Michael created an accidental automatism that was kept in the remote's memory. The mechanism is very complex and the movie doesn't have the same subtlety that allowed the script of "Back to the Future" to explain what the 'Flux Capacitor' was about with clarity, but we rapidly get the point, thanks to a clever editing. In a nutshell, just because Michael fast- forwarded one moment of intimacy with his wife, if he used the remote to go his next promotion, the remote would 'assume' that all the other sex moments would be fast- forwarded, all the sicknesses skipped, all the traffic jams and arguments too. As the remote gets more out of control, the jump in times gets bigger, and Michael quickly finds himself obese with obese kids, then old with a brilliant architect as a son and a daughter he finds sexy.
Then, the third act of the film takes one strange emotional turn, which might have disoriented both the fans and non-fans of Adam Sandler. In fact, it's already hinted in one of the first big jumps, one year ahead, when he learned that his kids wants to watch police/cop series instead of Dragons cartoons, and that his dog is dead. This part saddens us because we got attached to the dog too, despite his crazy habit that provided a cheap but irresistible joke. The worst is to come when incidentally, Michael learns from his son, the death of his father. This leads to a particularly heart-breaking moment, where Michael goes back to the last time he saw his father alive and kiss him goodbye, saying 'I love you'. If some people find this part emotionally manipulative, I respect that but I'm sure many others who endured or fear to endure the loss of a beloved figure could respond to that scene. The film falls in a kind of melodramatic exaggeration when Michael leaves the hospital after a seizure to give his son a last lesson about Family coming first, before dying, but the scene only works because of this exaggeration.
Indeed, the over-the-top melodrama provides the perfect contrast with the following scene when Michael wakes up from his nightmare, and if all that preceded doesn't hold a candle to the almighty "It's a Wonderful Life", the joy of Michael was absolutely communicative and I would have felt like the store kid when he played with him. The scene with his parents is the greatest emotional pay-off because we can see his father again, and we know we would have reacted exactly the same if we woke up from a dream where our beloved ones are dead. "Click" is highlighted by the last 10 minutes, and whether the film had some flaws, at least it conveys a positive and sensitive message about life.