Click

There’s something more than a little bit ironic that a movie preaching the gospel of the value of having nothing should rake in a projected $40 million on its opening weekend. Yes, the latest Adam Sandler assault on the art of film is one of those films — the kind where multi-millionaires explain to you that money can’t buy happiness, that solvency is for losers, and that the best things in life are free.

This one even shores up its premise by improbably dragging in the 1927 DeSylva, Brown and Henderson hit, “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” as a featured song at a wedding that takes place in the movie circa 2030, more than 100 years after the song debuted. On the other hand, the Harry Warren-Al Dubin Depression era song, “With Plenty of Money and You,” is used to demonstrate the sad fallacy of a positive cash flow. Why, we haven’t had a movie like this since R.V. came out a good nine weeks ago. Actually, bad as that was, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more obnoxious or odious variation on this bewhiskered bromide than Click.

For those five or six people who have been spared the advertising campaign, Adam Sandler plays Michael Newman, a neglectful dad and husband (is there another kind in Hollywood movies?). He’s a workaholic architect who decides to put down his product placement Twinkies and Yodels (Hostess and Drake’s Cakes get equal time, it seems) long enough to make a trip to the film’s product-placement setting, Bed, Bath and Beyond, to find a universal remote to help simplify his life. Here he meets Morty (Christopher Walken), a strange character in the “Way Beyond” section of the store, who provides him with just such a remote — one that actually controls his universe.

It actually controls everything — complete with a DVD-style menu and optional audio commentary by James Earl Jones (one of the film’s more inspired ideas). The remote is first used in bouts of arrested-development “comedy” — quieting the dog, turning himself into the Incredible Hulk with the hue control, slowing down a bosomy jogger to better watch her bounce — and then in ways that are increasingly more serious (if utterly illogical). He uses it to cut short sex with his wife (Kate Beckinsale), to get around a deadline at work, to survive a dismal dinner with his folks, etc. Soon he finds the remote control is controlling him. Once it learns what he wants, it makes such decisions on its own. All this leads to Newman ending up as a sad, lonely old man — well, sort of.

If it sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s partly cribbed from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (with the three ghosts seemingly replaced by three oversexed dogs who are constantly trying to marry a large stuffed duck). The rest is ripped off from Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. And why not? That’s the grand prize winner in the money-means-nothing sweepstakes.

Whatever dubious merits this opium for the “common folk” has, of course, are mixed with the requisite portions of Sandlerian humor, anger and homophobia — along with the standard bits for his buddies in small roles. Typically, the humor is both juvenile and angry. Newman’s idea of a good use for the remote control is to freeze his boss, slap him around and break wind in his face. Later, he freezes his wife’s second husband (Sean Astin) in order to safely kick him in the crotch — three times. When Morty first gives him the device, Newman worries that the guy wants to see him with his shirt off! (Does anybody really want to see Sandler with his shirt off?) I won’t even get into the whole dog and duck business that constitutes a running gag, or the fact that the film panders to base frat-boy images of a wife who can be magically shut up.

The whole film seethes with Sandler’s sophomoric world view of puerile jokes (flatulence, abusing kids, making fun of fat people, etc.), hot babes and random violent acts — and then turns around to make a supposedly serious comment. Actually, this turns out to be funnier than most of the comedy, since it requires Sandler to act — complete with an over-scored “death scene” — and that’s way beyond his limited talent.

Yes, bits and pieces of it are occasionally amusing, but the overall tone is so smug and mean-spirited that they drift into insignificance. At bottom, this is a truly vile movie pretending to be a heart-warming fantasy. Rated PG-13 for language, crude and sex-related humor, and some drug references.

— reviewed by Ken Hanke