I'm not sure why movie comedy stars have such a hard time holding their ground over the long haul. Maybe it's that whole "crying on the inside" clown thing … after a few years of making mass audiences laugh, too many comedians either start begging to be taken seriously (see: Jim Carrey, Robin Williams) or begin to look noticeably miserable on-screen (see: Eddie Murphy, and arguably Steve Martin).
Adam Sandler hasn't really gone the serious route yet–Punch-Drunk Love and Spanglish were, after all, essentially comedies–and so far he's kept the misery at bay. But in a fascinating bit of meta-evolution, his movies have increasingly become an extended look at what it's like to be Adam Sandler. Both 50 First Dates and Click have inverted premises, but wind up at more or less the same place. The former is about a guy who has to recreate the day he fell in love over and over, in order to keep his chronically forgetful girlfriend up to speed; and the latter is about a guy who gets a magical remote that lets him fast-forward through days that he later wishes he'd lived in full. Both are about Sandler trying to humble himself, and remind himself to take life a little easier.
But then, isn't that what Adam Sandler movies have always been about? He and his slacker cronies create slobby, schmucky, generally comfortable spaces for audiences to settle in. The laughs are dopey–and always PG-13, which dulls a lot of their potential edge–and the messages are generally positive, inasmuch as they encourage Sandler's fans to exert the minimum amount of effort required to remake their lives into a permanent version of their high school junior year. Even the music in Sandler's movies is stuck in the past. Click opens with The Cars' "Magic," for flip's sake.
[Aside: Part of the reason I missed seeing a movie last week was because I had in-laws in town to entertain, and I had to get some work done early so that I could take a two-day mini-vacation with my wife while her folks watched our kids. Anyway, we took advantage of our time off to go to a local amusement park–which should be a post all to itself–and were surprised to find that the loudspeaker music was exclusively blasting songs produced between 1965 and 1985, all day long. Apparently, classic rock still connotes summer, no matter what year it actually is.]
Of course, the problem with Click–a hard one to ignore–is that it's not all that funny. The jokes are of the "hey that dorky guy's wearing a Speedo" variety, and Rob Schneider's inevitable cameo has him playing an Arab whose name Sandler mispronounces as "Hubba Bubba" (which might actually have been funny, had Schneider not stepped on the line with his retort, "I am not bubblegum!"). And I won't even get into the standard Sandler obsessions with torturing bratty little kids, kicking the crap out of effeminately officious types, and farting.
But like the underrated 50 First Dates, Click is surprisingly poignant. It's got a vision of a kind–albeit one borrowed from Groundhog Day and A Christmas Carol, with a touch of Back To The Future. (There's that Sandler '80s fetish again.) Reduced to its core elements, Click might seem pat. Heck, it is pat. But there's a reason why these kinds of stories get told and re-told, and why they leave audiences with a little lift in their step, wanting to be better people, at least in the short term. They reassure us–rightly or wrongly–that life gets better as it goes, and looks great in retrospect. It's really only right now that's shitty.