Click part tragedy, part Sandler comedy, and the mix just doesn't work

Rating: 4/10 (22 July 2006)

Adam Sandler movies aren't quite as funny as they used to be. Billy Madison was by far the funniest, and it's been downhill since then, with The Longest Yard being his worst comedy yet. At the same time, Sandler has been involving himself in many more serious projects, such as Punch-Drunk Love and Spanglish. Click could be said to be a combination of the two, half a tragedy and half an immature fantasy comedy. It is this dual personality that is the main fault of Click, because it simply exists at two opposite poles.
The main premise of Click is something that everyone has probably thought of at one time or another. What if you could have a remote control that controlled events around you? Would you use to help others or to exercise all of your guilty pleasures in your darkest dreams? Would you give yourself a clean slate and start from page one? Would you use it for trial-and-error, trying something and if it doesn't work feeling free to rewind?
Click never delves too deeply into the psychology behind being your own God, because it is more obsessed with making it a personal tale rather than make the main character a metaphor for the audience to relate to. The movie follows Michael Newman (Sandler), a man with a beautiful wife (Beckinsale), two young children and the hope of soon making partner in an architectural firm, which has caused him to work insane hours and ignore his family. He doesn't have time for the regular things, such as taking his kids camping or making love to his wife.
As the straw that breaks the camel's back, he is having problems with the excessive number of remotes in his home which apparently control everything from light fixtures to the refrigerator. He goes out searching for a universal remote, finding only Bed, Bath and Beyond to be open. He ventures into the Beyond section and finds Morty (Walken), who gives him a top-of-the-line non-returnable remote for free, citing that sometimes good guys need a break. He leaves it up to Michael to find out that the remote controls his entire universe, allowing him to pause, fast-forward, chapter select, hear commentary, etc.
As you would expect from any Sandler movie, it starts out with him abusing his powers for personal benefit or for fun. He gives himself a tan using the tint, he revisits old childhood memories and he torments the child next door. He also uses it to skip past hard work periods or dinner with his parents (Winkler & Kavner), which leaves him as a near-zombie in autopilot. Some of what happens is fairly funny, just because we all know we'd love to do the same thing if given the chance, or because we manage to revel in Michael's joy with his new toy as he makes everyone speak Spanish or has James Earl Jones narrate his life. More often than not, it is about as crude as you'd expect from a Sandler movie, which bodes pretty bad, hitting lows such as dogs (yes, plural) humping a stuffed toy duck or Sandler farting into the face of his boss (Hasselhoff).
The movie does a quick 180 halfway through, turning into a tragedy as the remote automatically skips years at a time based on what he previously skipped. Basically, this means that he has spent most of his life on auto-pilot, and we see his life fall apart basically. As a tragedy, it works well, having a couple strong emotional moments near the end as he tries to stop his life from self-destructing.
The problem that exists is that Click is possibly the most bipolar movie I have ever seen. The first half is the Sandler brand of immature fart jokes, while the second half is a tragedy that seems perfect for date movies. To find an audience who would appreciate both the tear-jerking drama and the dog-humping humour would be quite a task. The fact that Click could have worked going in either direction adds insult to injury, as we potentially could have had two good movies with distinctly different moods, but the same subject matter. Instead, we have an amalgamation of the two approaches, and it is far too jumbled to be effective.
From an acting perspective, Sandler is surprisingly strong, though nothing that would gain him much more respect after turning in good performances in Punch Drunk Love and Spanglish. The rest of the cast is mostly forgettable, aside from a terrifically sleazy David Hasselhoff. Beckinsale is definitely strong, though it is far from career defining work. Even Christopher Walken, one of my personal favourite actors, is wasted, having a couple good lines here and there but more or less floating through the movie.
On a side note, the aging is done incredibly well on all characters, considering the movie spans more than twenty years. It isn't hard to mistake Sandler for a sixty year old near the end of the cycle, though the same effect isn't as noticeable on Beckinsale or Astin. Seeing an eighty-year old Henry Winkler proves to be one of the movie's more heartbreaking visuals.
There may be some gold hidden deep with Click, a movie that could have easily been much more. As it stands, it is likely to repulse just as much as it attracts. There is no way that a movie can be both a tragedy and have someone fart in David Hasselhoff's face. There was definitely potential for a movie about one of the most common fantasies in life, but few of the possibilities were realized. Maybe in a few years, the concept can be revisited with either a fully comic or fully dramatic attitude, or at least a more subtle blend of the two. The bipolarity of the movie essentially cancels out the audiences, making Click a movie for almost no one.
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