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by Flick Chick Vique Rojas

Our movie reviewer, Flick Chick Vique Rojas gives us her take on Click

I give Click a generous 3 Red Vines.

Adam Sandler is a bona-fide movie star. The fact that his latest release is his fifth movie to rake in 40 plus million on an opening weekend proves that.  Whether his movies are actually good or not is of no consequence.

Now before I go any further, let me go on record as saying I like Adam Sandler. He has a likeable persona and can be funny. I’ve gone to see movies of his that I enjoyed. And Christmas wouldn’t be the same without his Hanukkah songs. But the guy, in my opinion, also has a solid reputation for making bad movies. Or at least I’m not the audience for them. 

So it was with great dread that I headed off to see his latest comedy, Click.  Well, bottom line is that I didn’t completely hate it and his audience did indeed enjoy it. You will, too, if the sex lives of pets is amusing — over and over again.  Or seeing guys get hit in the head or crotch — over and over again.  These kinds of antics got the most laughs.

In Click, Sandler plays an overworked workaholic. In an attempt to simplify his life he decides to keep up with the Joneses (or in this case the O’Doyles) and gets himself one of those new fangled universal remotes. (Never mind that this revolutionary technology has been around for at least a decade!) But a mysterious salesman, Monty (Christopher Walken), instead gives him a remote that indeed controls his universe. Soon Sandler is zipping and zapping forward and backward through his life, savoring the sweet moments and avoiding anything and anybody he feels is a waste of time. It’s all well and good until the remote starts to program itself. Suddenly Sandler’s life seems to be over before it’s really begun.

The movie’s cast boasts so many familiar names it reads like a who’s who.  David Hasselhoff plays his macho boss, Kate Beckinsale (Aviator, Pearl Harbor), his wife. Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner (Marge Simpson!) play his parents, while Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings Trilogy) and Jennifer Coolidge (Best in Show, Joey) round out the cast. 

All of these actors do a fine job. And there’s a lot of production value in the movie as well. Oscar winning special effects makeup artist, Rick Baker, is only one of a handful of experts that do a fabulous job of aging and youthening the actors as is appropriate for the times Sandler ‘clicks’ in and out of.

Director Frank Coraci (The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer) does a nice job of keeping the pace up to make a tight 137 minutes. But co-writers Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe seem to be hampered by their sitcom experience. Jokes that are written for every other line fall flat 75% of the time. Only the visual, over the top gags of questionable taste seem to get laughs. Almost all of them failed to amuse me.

I guess my main complaint about Click is that it tries too hard, on every level. And for me, there is a big difference between ‘playing’ funny and ‘being’ funny. My knee jerk analysis would be that Sandler tends to make ‘guy’ movies.  But Sony’s exit polls showed that Click’s audience was 51% female, with 50% of total audience being under 25 years of age. 

Apparently only half of me is not the audience for it after all. That must explain why I didn’t completely hate it.

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