The Hindu : Karnataka News : Just can't find the right balance

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Sunday, Apr 10, 2011
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Karnataka

Just can't find the right balance

Go let it out:‘Just Go With It' features a few gross-outs that unleash the sniggering ten-year-olds inside us we're so careful to conceal.

Just Go With It (English)

Cast: Adam Sandler, Brooklyn Decker, Jennifer Aniston

Director: Dennis Dugan

The quantum of care and consideration that's been lavished on Adam Sandler' s latest ‘gromance' — his trademark love story with gross-out humour — is evident from the title Just Go With It.

An earlier film with the premise of a bachelor (played by Walter Matthau) pretending to be unhappily married in order to score with women bore an altogether different name: Cactus Flower.

That title was a reference to the prickly character played by Ingrid Bergman, who blossomed by the film's end. But metaphors are no longer in vogue today; you'd have to actually think to get what they mean.

And hence this great big shrug of a title, which is practically an injunction to the viewer to stop complaining and go with the flow, and which presumably came about because Oh If You Have Nothing Better To Do and Why Bother Fighting It were already taken.

Sandler, plays a plastic surgeon (all the better for enlargement and implant jokes) who falls for Brooklyn Decker's character despite his caddish philosophy of never getting too serious.

When she insists on meeting his wife, he's forced to find a makeshift spouse in his assistant, Jennifer Aniston, (making her own contributions to the target demographic by sporting, on different occasions, a bikini and a coconut shell bra).

Unsurprisingly, the layers in Cactus Flower — say, the easy cruelty of men such as Matthau, who think nothing of using “old maids” such as Bergman for their selfish purposes — are swept aside for getting-hit-in-the-crotch jokes (not one but two). And that is how it should be. For one, Aniston is nobody's idea of an old maid. Secondly, no one goes to an Adam Sandler movie to probe into the psyche of men of a certain vintage.

Sandler, as always, is a ten-year-old in a grown-up's body, and Just Go With It features a few gross-outs that unleash the sniggering ten-year-olds inside us we're so careful to conceal.

But the film's big problem is that it cannot find a balance between these gross-outs and the gooey romance at the centre, unlike in Sandler's 50 First Dates, which was a great ‘gromance'.

Sandler and Aniston never convince us that they belong together, not even amidst the location of sun-soaked Hawaii.

BARADWAJ RANGAN

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