Deception-Based Farce Gone Through the Sandler Blender

Rating: 6/10 (5 March 2011)

There is no getting around the fact that Jennifer Aniston is likable. In the past, she has attempted to be versatile with mixed results (effective in "The Good Girl", less so as a temptress in "Derailed"), but she remains most successful within a limited proximity of her Rachel Green character from the long-running "Friends" TV series. She's playing another variation of her in this rambunctious 2011 comedy ever so loosely based on the amiable 1969 farce, "Cactus Flower" starring Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman, and Goldie Hawn in her Oscar-winning debut. Believe it or not, Aniston is playing the Bergman role of Katherine, a single mom working as an assistant to Danny, a successful LA plastic surgeon played by Adam Sandler. The fact that Sandler is playing the Matthau role appears to be the primary joke here since he turns the excessively inventive single doctor into one of his standard wiseacre man-boy characters.
The movie opens with a flashback scene in which a pre-nose-job Danny discovers he is about to marry a shrew but soon realizes his gold band is a magnet for hot chicks. He then decides to avoid what he thinks is the inevitable disappointment of commitment by telling every girl he hooks up with that he's married. That ploy changes when he meets a blonde stunner named Palmer. He falls for her, but things start to fall apart when she discovers Danny's gold band in his pocket and assumes he's married. Convinced that Palmer is the one, Danny persuades Katherine to pretend to be his soon-to-be-ex-wife and uses her two manipulative kids as part of the charade. Things go according to formula, including a contrived trip to Hawaii where Katherine runs into a college sorority rival named Devlin, who has been the subject of Katherine's passive-aggressive hostilities all these years. In a bit of stunt casting, Nicole Kidman plays the ultra-competitive Devlin in a comically imperious fashion, while singer/musician Dave Matthews is arbitrarily thrown in the mix as her equally shallow, butt-clenching husband.
Even though this comedy is neither as consistently funny nor tightly structured as "Cactus Flower", I have to admit there is a bit of a Cary Grant/Irene Dunne-type of banter between Aniston and Sandler, at least during the first half when Katherine is introduced to Palmer as Danny's confident, materialistic wife (she names herself "Devlin"). These are the scenes that hew closest to the original movie and consequently work the best. Where it flounders is when the two actors need to show they are falling in love. Sandler is a relative blank slate during these more serious moments, and the lack of credibility in their characters' romantic relationship undermines the film. In the Goldie Hawn role, Brooklyn Decker fulfills the physical requirements as Palmer but is unlikely to be up for any Oscars this time next year. Nick Swardson wins my award for the year's most irritating best buddy in a Sandler comedy, especially when he pretends to be Katherine's lover, an Austrian sheep buyer. Sandler's former SNL colleagues Rachel Dratch and an almost unrecognizable Kevin Nealon show up in cameos as two comically unfortunate victims of plastic surgery.