What If?

Rating: 9/10 (28 June 2006)

Sandler's brand of humour is quite accessible and yet, it can be an acquired taste. What Sandler does very well is relating to its audience and not talking down to them. In "Trick" the protagonist represents us all of us, our wishes and frustrations, our dreams and nightmares, and that's what makes the movie so successful in meeting its goals.
The screenplay is deceptively simple, carrying us through the different stages in the lives of an average family. Here is lovely wife, two charming children, and an ambitious, driven father. With the assistance of a mysterious scientist, the father is able to skip through what he thinks are the worst times of his life, and eventually he unleashes a series of events that make him realize that his life is not so bad after all.
There are the usual touches of raunchy humour that one encounters in every Sandler movie, and those details keep it real. The performances are uniformly good, with Beckinsdale shining as the devoted wife, and some priceless cameos by Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner.
One wasn't ready to get hit with so much in depth in this type of movie. It was refreshing surprise to see that movies like this and "The Weather Man" last year can make one realize that as humans, we are capable of so much, and yet we keep wasting the potential to care for ourselves and others.