Aniston shines in Sandler comedy
Adam Sandler is best known for dumb comedies
– think
”
Happy Gilmore,
”
”
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan
”
and
”
Grown Ups.
”
And he is certainly not the typical lead for a romantic comedy.
But once in a while he ends up in a movie where he gets just the
right mix of dumb jokes and romance to make it an enjoyable
experience. It’s what he did in
”
The Wedding Singer,
”
with Drew Barrymore, which is an often replayed movie on cable
television.
Aniston shines in Sandler comedy
Adam Sandler is best known for dumb comedies – think “Happy Gilmore,” “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and “Grown Ups.” And he is certainly not the typical lead for a romantic comedy. But once in a while he ends up in a movie where he gets just the right mix of dumb jokes and romance to make it an enjoyable experience. It’s what he did in “The Wedding Singer,” with Drew Barrymore, which is an often replayed movie on cable television.
He did it again in “Just Go With It,” which is slightly reminiscent of the earlier film. Danny (Adam Sandler) is a dorky-looking guy with out-of-control curly hair and a nose the size of a pear. He is about to marry a woman who only wants to be with him because he is going to be a cardiologist. But when Danny overhears that she has been cheating on him with someone else, he calls off the wedding and ends up in a bar dressed in a tuxedo, with his gold band still on his finger.
When a hot chick mistakes him for a married man, he goes along with it and tells his tale of woe. He finds the wedding ring and tales of a mean wife gets really hot girls to sleep with him, no strings attached. He has an out ready from the get-go so he never has to get too involved again.
Flash forward a decade and Danny is a plastic surgeon who has had a nose job. He’s still sporting the wedding ring and weaving tales of marital distress. The only person who knows the truth about Danny’s lies is his office assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston.) She warns him that someday his web of lies will come back to bite him.
It happens soon enough. At a party, he slips off the wedding ring to patch up the skinned knee of a teenage boy. With the ring in his pocket, he runs into Palmer (Brooklyn Decker,) a gorgeous 23-year-old blond bombshell. The two spend a night together on the beach, and for once Danny doesn’t lie about being married. But in the morning, Palmer discovers the wedding ring, assumes he is married and calls the whole thing off.
Though he’s had a long string of hot girls, Danny is convinced Palmer is something more and he doesn’t want to just move on to the next hot girl. But he doesn’t consider telling her the truth about his wedding ring prop. Instead he invents a fake wife like he always does and says he is getting divorced. But Palmer wants to meet the soon-to-be ex-wife to ensure the marriage is really over.
Danny enlists Katherine to be his fake wife, but before she can play the part he makes her over into the perfect plastic surgeon’s wife. One of the funniest moments in the movie is the banter between Danny and Katherine as they shop for designer clothes for her makeover. She negotiates for a few pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes, Dolce and Gabbana, Gucci and more, all to play the part of his materialistic, cheating wife.
Why Katherine goes along with the whole thing isn’t clear, except that she and Danny seem to have a connection of which neither of them really seems fully aware. In fact, one of the things that makes the film is that Aniston seems to have the same kind of chemistry on screen with Sandler as she had with her “Friends” costars for so many years, something that was lacking in her last romantic comedy, “The Bounty Hunter.”
The lies continue to expand as Danny eventually enlists Katherine’s children to play his fake kids to seal the deal with Palmer, who is a math teacher who loves little ones. Maggie (Bailee Madison) and Michael (Griffin Gluck) bargain for plenty of loot before they agree to play Danny’s kids, including an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii.
Instead of a romantic trip with Palmer, Danny finds himself spending plenty of time with his fake wife, his fake children and his annoying cousin Eddie (Nick Swardson) even finagles his way into coming on the trip. As Swardson often does in films, his character Eddie provides a foil for a lot of dumb jokes. Adding to the drama, Katherine runs into an old frenemy from college, Devlin (Nicole Kidman.) Kidman is perfect as the haughty know-it-all who has to be the best.
“Just Go With It” is predictable, but the chemistry between Aniston and Sandler makes the film work as Katherine and Danny come to the slow realization that they might be more than coworkers.
Melissa Flores can be reached at
mf*****@pi**********.com
. She writes a blog at http://melissa-movielines.blogspot.com, where she writes about movies, TV, food and more.
