ridiculous plot... but very funny, and surprisingly heart-warming

Rating: 8/10 (16 April 2011)

The plot is utterly ridiculous, but I'll try to summarize anyway, just for giggles: A successful plastic surgeon (Sandler) is a horndog who wears a wedding ring because it helps him score with chicks. But then he meets a Cute Young Chick (Decker) who he wants to have a relationship with... but she finds the ring in his pants, and goes nuts because she won't date married men. So the Good Doctor makes up a marriage (to his Kind Assistant, played by Anniston) and impending divorce (because of her infidelity with Dolph Lundgren, but not THAT Dolph Lundgren). And Cute Young Chick now wants to meet the (soon to be ex) wife, just so she can check he's really telling the truth. It happens all the time, I'm sure.
Now, if you can believe this (it's Anniston, after all), Kind Assistant is a Plain Jane, so now the Good Doctor has to take her for an Extreme Makeover, so she can look like a well-maintained Hollywood Wife. Then the two girls meet, it goes great... but, at the end of the evening, Kind Assistant gets a call from her kids, and forgets the role play. So, now, Cute Young Chick thinks the Good Doctor has kids... and now she wants to meet THEM, to see if he's a good father.
The Crazy Kids extort the Good Doctor in return for pretending to be his children, and get a bunch of acting classes, video games, food... and a family trip to Hawaii to swim with the dolphins. If you've stayed with me so far, you can picture the sunshine and beaches of Hawaii, with the Good Doctor, his would-be girlfriend the Cute Young Chick, his fake wife, the fake wife's fake boyfriend, the fake Dolph Lundgren. And, of course, the fake wife's real kids, posing as the Good Doctor's fake kids.
To add to the fake-ness, Nicole Kidman and Dave Mathews show up as a third couple, Kidman being the hyper-competitive bitchy high school friend of Anniston's, who's a pretentious fake. And Mathews as her boyfriend and inventor of the iPod. He's fake too, because he's not the inventor of the iPod, and he's gay, so not much use on the boyfriend front. Now, Kind Assistant is playing awful about-to-be ex-wife of Good Doctor around Cute Young Chick... but is forced to play real Kind Assistant around Kidman and Mathews... with wonderful marriage to hugely successful Good Doctor, as a bit of relationship one-upmanship.
Maybe it's better if you think of it as a farce.
While there, Good Doctor realizes that Crazy Kids and Kind Assistant are the ones he loves, rather than Cute Young Chick. I bet you didn't see that one coming.
The kids are great, a deadpan boy (Griffin Gluck), and an aspiring actress girl (Bailee Madison), putting on a Mary Poppins English accent, with extra helping of Dick van Dyke. Luckily, they have some very nice awwww, ain't kids adorable moments.
Anniston does a really great job of being kind and lovable. Dolph Lundgren (Nick Swardson, a Sandler regular) is a hoot as Anniston's fake boyfriend, with some kind of Schwarzenneger-ish German-ish accent, as a dot-com sheep entrepreneur. Brooklyn Decker just has to be cute and sweet, and she does a pretty good job for a model. And, given that she's an SI cover girl, she did well at being cute, but not too smoking hot to be involved in all these shenanigans.
And Sandler ties it all together, with the usual Sandler shtick. But better than usual, and much more genuine. He's a bit more grown-up, and a bit more toned-down, than most of his roles.
The Sandler/Anniston connection is very sweet and believable, and it's what carries the film. Overall, I think this is one of the best things I've seen both Anniston and Sandler do. It was a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable couple of hours. It's a great date movie with lots of sweetness and romance, with a bit of Sandleresque stupid stuff going on to keep the guys distracted.