I think I have to compare this movie to my experience of The Break-Up in this review. Now, I know I went OTT in that particular review but in a nutshell, the point was, I hated it, it wasn’t my kind of movie. It began with a cliché, purported to be something different, but just ended with a cliché anyway, and that pissed me off and I hated it.

I need to also begin by saying, as I think I have often in the past when writing about Adam Sandler movies, how I used to hate Adam Sandler with venom. It really took Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, I think, as well as the presence of Winona Ryder, to get me to watch Mr. Deeds, which finally got me hooked on the guy. I’m always surprised by how much I love Adam Sandler movies. And this one is no exception. It starts with an idea as old as the hills, a schoolboy fantasy made real, ends pretty much where it begins, with a cliché .... yet it never once pretends it’s anything but a modern-day Frank Capra flick. That’s the saving grace, in no pretense.

That’s not to say the movie is without depth. I think what I love so much about this movie, what I love about any movie I love, I guess, is how ably it moves from extreme to extreme. One minute you have Sandler stood on a desk farting in David Hasselhoff’s face (“Oh my god, I taste sh*t!” – sorry, I know some people don’t enjoy that kinda humour but if it’s done right, it still kills me, lol), the next you’re confronted with some seriously moving scene where Sandler realises he’s missed his children growing up, his father’s death, his own separation from his wife, and more. It’s the old Aladdin and the genie thing, after you get what you want you don’t want it, etc, but there’s something about the way it’s done here, it just goes so bad for Sandler’s character, so sourly, bitterly, painfully, surprisingly, seemingly undoably wrong … this kind of story really hasn’t been done this way or this good before. My emotional response to this movie kinda reminded me of how hard The Sixth Sense hit me the first time I saw it. While the context is utterly fantastic – there a ghost wandering the earth oblivious to his state of existence, here a magical remote that manipulates the universe – the implication is shatteringly real. A lot of us go around on auto-pilot sometimes, sometimes more than we’d like; we kinda don’t need that magical remote in our hand to suddenly wake up one day and wonder where our life went, just like we don’t need to be dead to be dead to the world around us.

I know that’s a bold comparison … but I guess this comes down to: this movie took me places I really didn’t expect it too, even after the many interviews etc I’ve seen where, just like Vaughn and Aniston on The Break-Up, the cast and crew waxed lyrical over how “different” and “surprising” Click turned out to be. The biggest difference of all is, on Click they really weren’t talking sh*t.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 6:17 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.