Buy the soundtrack and a big mac

Rating: 3/10 (3 June 2005)

I'm a white guy. Saw this movie in theater where the entire crowd (full house) was nearly all black. So I'm watching this movie, realizing that every single white character on screen (with exception to a charisma-free Sandler) is utterly terrible: one-note, shallow, flat, weird/creepy, etc. (oh yeah, the former governor of Minnesota, too, but as he's wearing an "X" jersey, I suppose a self-deprecating reference to the XFL debacle, he fits in the last category). And all Texans are racist and sadistic, by nature of being Texan. Okay, well, I don't know many Texans, maybe MTV does. But I'm not just getting my liberal-white-guilt dander up: this movie REALLY is racist, and very violent - I mean, not just football rough-and-tumble, but I mean just taking grim pleasure in punching and kicking, in very personal "gangsta beat-down" kinda ways. Everybody loves to see a prisoner get punched in the stomach with a truncheon, repeatedly, with a sound effect like a giant slab of meat splatting on a marble floor - but after four or five dozen times it loses its dramatic impact. The race baiting is really so deliberate, it's insulting: the filmmakers could defend themselves by claiming that the one scene where "n*****" is used as the worst possible fly-off-the-handle taunt (and practically right INTO the camera, repeatedly) is an indictment of racism. It's not at all; it's re-enforcing stereotypes and reactions, re-enforcing subservience vs. dominance roles, re-enforcing grinning complicity vs. dignity, as well as just being the basest kind of audience manipulation. Oh, the movie CONDEMNS racism on the surface, sure - and thank God, because I don't think enough people knew that racism was bad. And it IS a prison movie - so naturally, every black person you see in the movie is a criminal. What's funny is that no crimes happen in the movie - a little harmless B&E, a little sabotage, but the only violence perpetrated by anyone in the movie is by the white drawling guards, and mostly upon Adam Sandler - and normally, that would be entertaining enough for me.
To give the movie credit where credit is due: a bunch of great songs all the way through. What a sweet music supervision deal this movie must've been, for MTV, for Sony, for a bank of happy lawyers !
Oh yeah, another message of the movie: McDonalds is better than drugs or sex. Believe it ! What's their big popular sandwich, a something something with cheese ? Oh, they repeated the product name at least twenty times, how could I forget ?
I like football movies cause I like football. Sometimes movie football is more drama than realism, and that's okay. This movie moved away from the realistic, and moved away from the drama as well. Football is a plot device, a tool, providing many soundtrack song placement opportunities.
Oh yeah - this movie, in one of the opening bits, also shows how much fun driving while stinking drunk is - fun and ultimately harmless. Many cars get totalled, terrible wreckage, flying down the 101, then BOOM, our hero stumbles out drunk as hell, with maybe just a scratch on his head. But it's okay ! The wrecked cars are all cops, no one gets hurt, and it's all good fun. See, honey?, this is what grownups do to let off steam !
Shame on Chris Rock for being in this turkey. For a comedian who's gotten so much mileage out of race stereotypes and sub-textual racism in society, he's not doing his beloved peoples any favors here - and he doesn't really do anything funny.
One bright glimmer of hope for comedy: Tracy Morgan as a classic-flavor prison bitch. He plays it to the hilt, and makes it as funny as the boneheaded script would let him. Good for him.
Shame on everyone else. There's a lot of them to be ashamed - all the way through the movie, I kept saying to myself, "Damn, HE'S in this, too ? And there's THAT guy !". Thanks, MTV power ! Now see if you can Premiere-plugin airbrush the age spots off of Courtney Cox's cleavage.
I walked out of this movie during the last third, wandered around the theatre, dropped in on other movies. Came back just in time for an anticlimax that Bert Reynolds, I'm sure, had insisted upon in his contract - HE was going to get the big winning touchdown. Hoo. Ray.
Oh, I see that Adam Sandler's production company is called "Happy Madison" - Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, very clever. See, if I ever made just one crappy horrible sports/retarded flavored comedy after another, I'd want people to remember me for them, too.
So what was up with that "Punch Drunk Love" crap, anyway ? Who thought THAT was funny ?
Seriously, I just have to come to the conclusion that the reason Adam Sandler did a great movie there was because of P.T. Anderson, because his talent is of a school-cafeteria-lunch table clown level.
One great thing about this movie, too - good sound. A very good sounding mix on this movie. Good sound.