½*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Tim Herlihy
directed by Steven Brill
by Walter Chaw It isn't that Mr. Deeds is unfunny that nettles the most, it's that Mr. Deeds is smug and lazy and unfunny. The film is Adam Sandler not trying very hard anymore, a guy with a puerile and boorish sense of humour getting together with all his buddies to drink beer and tell jokes about dumb people and Spaniards. Except for the three scenes it recreates from Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town shot for shot, it has almost nothing to do with its source material, choosing instead to try to cash in again on Sandler's peculiar, lisping, psychopathic man-child persona. Judging by the declining box-office of Sandler's films (even though I sort of liked Little Nicky), the alleged comedian would probably do well not to rely upon the good graces of his dimwitted frat fanbase and start looking for inspiration in places other than his own films.
Longfellow Deeds (Sandler) likes to hug rather than shake hands, composes terrible poems in the hope that Hallmark will buy them, and beats the ever-loving tar out of people who offend him. I'd like to be clever and dissect Sandler's Deeds character as bits and pieces of other Sandler characters--a little of Bobby Boucher mixed with a little of Happy Gilmore, for instance--but the truth of the matter is that Sandler never really plays a different character, just variations on the same one. Because Sandler imagines himself a romantic (while succeeding to portray romance well in only The Wedding Singer), Winona Ryder appears as the wilting love interest Babe in a performance so bizarre that it's actually frightening. She's a tabloid journalist masquerading as a small-town girl to woo small-town Deeds and get the scoop on the man we discover has just inherited forty-billion dollars from a long-lost uncle and media tycoon (Harve Presnell).
The possibilities of a bumpkin suddenly getting a lot of money are squandered completely, save for a clunky scene where Deeds gives twenty grand to a couple celebrating an anniversary and another where he buys two bikes for, yes, twenty grand apiece, Deeds's sudden riches play no part in the comedy of the film. (Though one could mount a compelling argument that this is no failing, as there is no actual comedy in the film.) Instead, we're treated to Sandler punching several people in the face (including an obese opera singer who proclaims wondrously that he's shat himself), a sequence in which seven cats are thrown out a third-story window (one of them ablaze), a collection of ethnic servant types, and of course Rob Schneider in a Kevin Smith-ian in-joke that wasn't funny the first time (in The Waterboy) and is really, really tired at this point.
Mr. Deeds has the requisite sing-along (to Bowie's "Space Oddity"), the mass snarfing of a deep-pocketed fast-food franchise, a bad cameo by a sports hero (John McEnroe), a foul-mouthed earth mama (Conchata Ferrell), and a fetishistic shot of Sandler eating a bowl of cereal. Mr. Deeds, in other words, is a worm feast of recycled jokes and images paced like an octogenarian foot race, edited (by Jeff Gourson) and directed (by Steven Brill) with a level of incompetence (mismatched scenes, mismatched lighting, continuity errors) truly staggering to behold. The picture is a primer on what happens when lack of know-how mixes with lack of give-a-damn, which is really none of my business except that Sandler expects his shrinking fanbase to fund his tireless fecklessness in perpetuity. There's something really wrong about taking a built-in audience for granted and Sandler has officially joined the ranks of Kevin Smith and George Lucas as artists aware that they'll make a buck no matter what they throw out there.
Sandler's grown too big for checks and balances and his apparent lack of a non-toady in his retinue is taking a heavy toll on his product and popularity. Mr. Deeds is an endurance test bereft of ideas and reeking of sloth. It isn't as bad as Big Daddy, but it's only better than that in Sandler's already devalued and continually questionable oeuvre. When the best you can say about a film is that it's a little better than Big Daddy, you've got some problems.
