Forrest Gump meets Gilbert Grape

Rating: 6/10 (5 May 2017)

The Waterboy is a dumb comedy that plays like a cross between Forrest Gump and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, seasoned with Adam Sandler's inimitable silliness. Like Forrest Gump, it's about a "slow" southern man whose athletic potential is one day noticed by a college football coach who goes on to recruit him for the team. Like Gilbert Grape, it's about a young man who is trapped in his family home taking care of his overweight mother, played here by the lovely and iconic Kathy Bates.
The plot for The Waterboy is decidedly silly, and that's by design. But it's no sillier than a typical Hollywood film; the only difference here is that the filmmakers were aware of the absurdity, and that's what is good about it. Everybody's in on the joke. It's about a young man, played by Adam Sandler, who is a dedicated waterboy, serving the players of a college football team for years and without any thanks. He endures much torment from the team members and coach, who constantly ridicule him, and one day he is fired. The coach for the opposing team—played by Henry Winkler in his finest and most hilarious role—recruits him first as a waterboy and then as a linebacker, despite his mother's wishes.
He has an extraordinary ability to tackle opponents, due to the anger that has built up within him from years of verbal abuse. But he can only tackle them if he is mad at them, so he imagines the faces of his tormentors on the players of the opposing team. At first he imagines the evil head coach of the team who fired him, then later the players who bullied him, and eventually his own overbearing mother.
Like most of Sandler's comedies, the story is of course stitched together with tons of jokes, which are sometimes corny, sometimes hilarious, always ridiculous, and very often extremely quotable. This is perhaps the most quotable of Adam Sandler's films, and for that reason it is one of the most memorable. I watched it once or twice the year it came out and never saw it again until eighteen and a half years later, but I still remembered so many of the lines.
My favorite is when the waterboy's coach tells him, right before a play, "Water sucks. Gatorade is better." He tells him to use the anger that he feels in hearing that statement on the field to tackle opponents. It's a simple line, and seems like a corny joke at first, but it's actually on of cinema's most hilarious lines for so many reasons.
It's hilarious because up until then, the waterboy had been using his deep-seated anger to bring out his rage on the field. But then we see him do just as well based on an insult that his own kindhearted coach mutters to him moments before he steps onto the field, despite the fact that the waterboy himself must know he doesn't really mean it, and in an instant comically trivializing all of the waterboy's abuse that had been built up until that point. It's hilarious that someone would be so personally offended by such a claim about water. And it's hilarious because we all know that water doesn't suck, as it's necessary for survival. The levels of humor are so subtle that one could easily miss them, but they're there. It almost makes me wonder if perhaps ever the writers didn't pick up on them.