Despite all of the grumpy and/or gleeful speculation that arose around the internet when it got its first glimpse of Adam Sandler donning a wig and falsies to play his own awkward twin sister, Jack and Jill is not actually the worst movie of all time. Given other recent efforts from Sandler’s Happy Madison production company, most notably Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, it’d be hard pressed to even compete for the title of worst of the year. The film, directed by longtime Sandler collaborator Dennis Dugan and written by Steve Koren, presents an at least theoretically standard mix of slapstick, celebrity cameos and not-quite-winking sentimentality. It’s sometimes funny, but more often it’s just very strange and threaded through with hostility — at one point, during a montage that involved Jill repeatedly accidentally injuring a myopic Mexican grandmother at a picnic, the colleagues on either side of me leaned in separately to whisper, “What is happening?”
It’s as if, after years of playing characters with temper issues, Sandler has finally let some of that repressed rage leak out toward the audience. And it’s not just the can’t-believe-they-actually-made-it concept of Jack and Jill that gives that impression. This is a film in which the product placement is so blatant (hello, Royal Caribbean Cruises!) it’s like a meta-joke with no punchline, in which a climactic moment of familial resolution is delivered entirely in nonsensical “twin talk” that goes on and on in a way that doesn’t strive for either humor or sincere emotionality.
Maybe it’s fitting that a film…
John Latini John Mayer Johnny Bananas, Johnny Depp Johnny Devenanzio,
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