# Jack and Jill (2011 film)

Jack and Jill is a 2011 American comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan from a script by Steve Koren and Adam Sandler. Released on November 11, 2011, by Sony Pictures Releasing under its Columbia Pictures label, the film stars Sandler in a dual role as the titular twin siblings, as well as Katie Holmes and Al Pacino. It tells the story of an advertisement executive who dreads the Thanksgiving visit of his unemployed twin sister who overstays into Hanukkah at a time when he is instructed to procure Al Pacino's appearance in an upcoming Dunkin' Donuts commercial.
The film was panned by critics, who criticized the humor and premise, although Al Pacino's performance received some praise. Some have since considered the film to be one of the worst films ever made. At the 32nd Golden Raspberry Awards, the film was nominated for a record of 12 Razzies in all ten categories. It became the first film to sweep the Razzies, winning in each category, including Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor, Worst Actress and Worst Screenplay. The film's ten wins was also a record for most Razzies won by any film.

## Plot

Growing up in the Bronx, Jill Sadelstein makes repeated unsuccessful attempts to capture the attention of her gifted twin brother Jack by injuring him or repelling others from him. As an adult, Jack is a successful advertising executive who resides in Los Angeles with his wife Erin, their biological daughter Sofia, and their adoptive Hindu son Gary, who compulsively tapes various objects to his body. Conversely, Jill is unemployed and lives alone in their childhood home, which she inherited following their mother's death the previous year.
Jill visits Jack for Thanksgiving and announces that she plans to depart at the end of Hanukkah, having an open-ended plane ticket, much to his consternation. At dinner, her obnoxious behavior embarrasses a homeless guest, Otto, as well as Erin's parents, Carter and Bitsy Simmons. Jack snaps at Jill, and she flees into the woods with her pet cockatoo Poopsie. Erin demands that Jack apologize to her, which he reluctantly does.
Jill proceeds through a list of activities that she has planned to accomplish during her visit, including being a contestant on The Price Is Right (she receives a variety of prizes after incapacitating herself while spinning the wheel), going horseback riding (she proves to be too heavy for a pony that collapses under her weight), and touring a studio. When she answers her phone in the middle of a movie, Jack reprimands her, and she exits in tears.
Deciding that Jill needs a romantic partner, Jack, aided by his children, encourages her to try online dating. She is initially unsuccessful, until Jack alters her profile and posts it on Craigslist, garnering more than 100 responses. A person nicknamed "Funbucket" meets her at a high-end restaurant, but a few minutes into their evening, he retreats into the men's restroom and hides there until she leaves. The staff of Jack's company, Sunny & Sadelstein, throw him a birthday party. Jill attends, but disgraces herself along with Jack and his colleagues, resulting in her ejection.
Meanwhile, Jack tries to cast Al Pacino in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial for their newest menu item, the Dunkaccino. At a Lakers game, Pacino ignores Jack but becomes infatuated with Jill. He gives her his phone number and invites her to his home, where she accidentally destroys his Oscar statuette. Uninterested in him, she promptly departs. Jack's Mexican gardener Felipe, also smitten with her, introduces her to his family at their annual fiesta. She immediately connects with everyone; however, after trying Mexican food for the first time, she suffers a severe case of diarrhea.
Pacino agrees to work on the Dunkaccino advertisement on the condition that he has another date with Jill, so Jack invites her to accompany him and his family on a cruise. She insists on bringing Poopsie, despite the cruise line's strict policy against pets. At sea, Jill and Poopsie irritate everybody onboard. When Jill repeatedly rebuffs Pacino, Jack disguises himself as her and flirts with him on her behalf. Suspecting that her invitation was only to convince Pacino to do the advertisement, she phones Jack and hears Pacino in the background. Dejected, she returns home. Arriving in the Bronx on New Year's Eve, Jill discovers that the bank has foreclosed on her home after she discarded numerous bills that she mistook for junk mail.
Jill, now homeless, encounters a group of former schoolmates, led by class bully Monica, at a restaurant. Jack arrives with his family, and the siblings reconcile via their made-up language. Monica attacks Erin, but Jill defends her. Pacino arrives dressed as Don Quixote, his character in a Broadway production of Man of La Mancha, and reminds Jill that he cares about her but that other men deserve her more than he does. She returns to Felipe, who confesses that he loves her, and they start a relationship.
Pacino ultimately disapproves of Jack's agency's commercial, which features him rapping, and instructs Jack to destroy all iterations of it.

## Cast

* Adam Sandler as:
** Jack Sadelstein, a gifted advertisement executive
** Jill Sadelstein, the unemployed fraternal twin sister of Jack
* Katie Holmes as Erin Sadelstein, Jack's wife and Jill's sister-in-law
* Al Pacino as himself, an actor who Jack is instructed to get for a Dunkin' Donuts commercial
* Eugenio Derbez as:
** Felipe, Jack's gardener and Jill's love interest
** Juangelina, Felipe's grandmother
* Tim Meadows as Ted
* Santiago Segura as Eduardo
* Nick Swardson as Todd
* Allen Covert as Otto, a homeless man who attends Jack's Thanksgiving dinner. Covert played a similar role in Happy Gilmore, in which he is also a caddy for the titular character.
* Rohan Chand as Gary Sadelstein, Jack and Erin's adoptive son and Jill's nephew
* Elodie Tougne as Sofia Sadelstein, Jack and Erin's biological daughter and Jill's niece
* Geoff Pierson as Carter Simmons, Erin's father
* Valerie Mahaffey as Bitsy Simmons, Erin's mother
* Gad Elmaleh as Xavier
* Gary Valentine as Dallas
* Kristin Davis as Delilah
* Norm Macdonald as "Funbucket", Jill's blind date
* Julia Perri as Sally Cashier
* Dana Carvey as a Scrapply Puppeteer
* David Spade as Monica
* Jackie Seiden as Tracy
* Georgia Hatzis as Carol
The film features cameos from Johnny Depp, Regis Philbin (in his final film appearance), Dan Patrick, Shaquille O'Neal, Drew Carey, John McEnroe, Christie Brinkley, Bill Romanowski, Michael Irvin, Jared Fogle, Billy Blanks, Vince Offer, Günter Schlierkamp and Caitlyn Jenner (the latter prior to her transition, as Bruce Jenner) as themselves.

## Production

In 2024, Al Pacino elaborated on his decision to join the cast of the film, stating, "It came at a time in my life that I needed it, because it was after I found out I had no more money. My accountant was in prison, and I needed something quickly. So I took [Jack and Jill]."

## Reception
### Box office

The film opened in 3,438 theaters at #2 with $25,003,575, behind Immortals, which debuted in the top spot with $32,206,425. The film closed on February 26, 2012, with a total gross of $74,158,157 in North America. It also made $75,515,631 in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $149,673,788 against its $79 million budget.

### Critical response

Unusually, Jack and Jill was screened for critics in Ireland but not in the United Kingdom. It was panned by reviewers.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 3% based on 116 reviews, with an average rating of 2.90/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Although it features an inexplicably committed performance from Al Pacino, Jack and Jill is impossible to recommend on any level whatsoever." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 23 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on a scale of A+ to F.
On the day of the premiere, comedians such as Jake Fogelnest launched a parody promotional account on Twitter bashing the film; garnering hundreds of followers and its posts retweeted by figures such as Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer and Alan Sepinwall. It was taken down by Twitter that evening due to a complaint from a Sony executive.
Critics from The Daily Beast, The Austin Chronicle and Time declared Jack and Jill to be the worst Sandler film. Critique that were noted issues in other Sandler films were present, and even worsened, in Jack and Jill. Common criticisms were targeted toward the crude humor, product placement, celebrity cameos, and a sentimental ending that contradicts the film's mostly mean-spirited tone.
The A.V. Club's Scott Tobias critiqued Sandler's lack of passion, describing most scenes with the actor "waiting around for somebody to feed him a line". Time contributor Mary Pols described a joke about Jack's obsessed fear of anti-semitism as a punch line with no joke.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone also argued, "Al Pacino said something great. After he looks at himself in the commercial, he says, 'Burn this! Nobody must ever see this!' That's my review of Jack and Jill."
Andrew Barker of Variety said that the film's "general stupidity, careless direction and reliance on a single-joke premise that was never really funny to begin with are only the most obvious of its problems".
Pacino's performance was positively received, and some critics noted it to be one of the film's best parts, although his presence was questioned. The London Evening Standard found the actor (playing himself) to be "slumming" it in providing Jill one of the film's few funny parts.
Despite generally scathing reviews, the film did receive some positive reception. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle stated that while he found the character Jill annoying, "almost everything else in this comedy succeeds. The central situation...has comic energy... (the film has) successful bits and big moments of satisfying comedy."
Tom Russo of The Boston Globe gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of a possible four, writing, "What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick this movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt."
Armond White of CityArts praised the film's "comic introspection", writing that "Sandler's comedies are not 'dumb fun', maybe that's why they're not in critics' favor."
Jack and Jill was in the top five of numerous critics' lists of the worst films of 2011, ranking number one on those of People's Alynda Wheat, the Miami Herald's Rene Rodriguez, Time's Mary Pols, The A.V. Club staff, and the Sioux City Journal's Bruce Miller. For Rolling Stone, Peter Travers ranked it the year's second-worst film and tied Sandler's performance with Anne Hathaway in One Day for his recognition of worst actor of the year. Since then, it has been called one of the worst films of all-time by the Evening Standard and Rotten Tomatoes, as well as one of the worst Sandler films by Variety.

### In popular culture

Five months before release and the film getting extremely poor reception, the film was mocked on South Park during the episode "You're Getting Old", in which Stan and his friends go to the movie theater to watch X-Men: First Class, a trailer depicts Adam Sandler's characters Jack and Jill as feces (the following episode, "Ass Burgers", first aired on October 5, showing the character Stan Marsh needing to intoxicate himself with alcohol to laugh at the film), and in Robot Chicken during Season 6 during the segment "Twist Endings", depicting Jill being Jack, and that the real Jill died when she was young; Jack is driven so insane by the revelation that he immediately smashes his mirror and ends his life by slitting his throat with one of the broken mirror pieces. A screening of the film was a reward given to the Upolu tribe in Survivor: South Pacific.

### Accolades

At the 32nd Golden Raspberry Awards, Jack and Jill won all 10 categories, a first in the 32-year history of the annual parody event: Worst Picture (for Sandler, Jack Giarraputo, and Todd Garner), Worst Actor and Worst Actress (for Sandler), Worst Supporting Actor (for Swardson and Pacino, which the latter won), Worst Supporting Actress (for Holmes and Spade in drag, which the latter won), Worst Director (for Dugan), Worst Screenplay (for Sandler, Ben Zook, and Steve Koren), Worst Screen Couple (for Sandler and either Pacino, Holmes or Sandler), Worst Ensemble and Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel. Sandler also set another Razzie record by garnering 11 personal nominations in total, breaking Eddie Murphy's 2008 five-nomination record for the most garnered by one individual in a single ceremony (for Norbit). In addition to Jack and Jill, he was also nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay nominations for Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star; and two Worst Screen Couple awards for Just Go with It. Razzie founder John J. B. Wilson called "almost karmic for someone to have made that much razz-able stuff in one year", suggesting the actor "angered someone really powerful, I would say".
| Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result |
| Alliance of Women Film Journalists | Hall of Shame | Production and Cast | Nominated |
| ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards | Top Box Office Films | Rupert Gregson-Williams | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Picture | Todd Garner, Jack Giarraputo and Adam Sandler | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Director | Dennis Dugan | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Actor | Adam Sandler (also for Just Go with It) | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Actress | Adam Sandler (in drag) | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Supporting Actor | Al Pacino (as himself) | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Supporting Actor | Nick Swardson (also for Just Go with It) | Nominated |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Supporting Actress | Katie Holmes | Nominated |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Supporting Actress | David Spade (in drag) | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Screenplay | Screenplay by Adam Sandler and Steve Koren; Story by Ben Zook | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Screen Couple | Adam Sandler and either Katie Holmes, Al Pacino, or himself (in drag) | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Screen Ensemble | The entire cast | Won |
| Golden Raspberry Awards | Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel | Rip-off/Remake of Glen or Glenda | Won |
| Golden Schmoes Awards | Worst Movie of the Year | Worst Movie of the Year | Won |
| Houston Film Critics Society Awards | Worst Picture | Worst Picture | Nominated |
| Internet Film Critic Society Awards | Worst Film | Worst Film | Won |
| Kids' Choice Awards | Favorite Movie Actor | Adam Sandler | Won |
| Women Film Critics Circle Awards | Worst Female Images in a Movie | Worst Female Images in a Movie | Nominated |