Bedtime Stories Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 01.03.2009

Disney takes Adam Sandler back to the well...

Directed by: Adam Shankman
Written by: Matt Lopez & Tim Herlihy

Starring:
Adam Sandler - Skeeter Bronson
Keri Russell - Jill Bronson
Guy Pearce - Kendall
Russell Brand - Mickey
Richard Griffiths - Barry Nottingham
Teresa Palmer - Violet Nottingham
Lucy Lawless - Aspen
Courteney Cox - Wendy
Jonathan Morgan Heit - Patrick
Laura Ann Kesling - Bobbi
Jonathan Pryce - Marty Bronson
Nick Swardson - Engineer
Kathryn Joosten - Mrs. Dixon
Mikey Post - Angry Dwarf
Rob Schneider - Thief



Running Time: 95 minutes
Rated PG for some mild rude humor and mild language

Adam Sandler is one of the true Saturday Night Live success stories. After a successful five-year stint on the sketch comedy show to end all sketch comedy shows, Sandler made the perilous leap that many other members of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players made into films, and has enjoyed far more success then some of his peers. Starting with Billy Madison in 1995, Sandler’s movie career has been remarkably successful, as audiences connected with his goofy humor. After a string of successful broad comedies including Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy and Big Daddy, Sandler suffered his first failure with Little Nicky, which didn’t seem to connect with audiences or critics. It was then that he moved on to more varied roles, taking a critically-acclaimed role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love in 2002. It was the role that had people scratching their heads at the possibility of “Adam Sandler” and “Oscar” being mentioned in the same sentence, and while he didn’t get an Academy Award nomination, he did pull down a Golden Globe nom for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Since then, Sandler has peppered his resume with equal parts comedy (such as 50 First Dates and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) and more serious roles (Spanglish and the amazing Reign Over Me). This year however he seems to have gone back to his earlier days of pure comedy. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan was a commercial success but a critical bomb, and now we have his newest effort, Disney Pictures’ Bedtime Stories.

Sandler plays Skeeter Bronson, the son of a hotel owner Marty (Pryce). In voiceover, we learn that Marty used to love telling his son wildly fantastic bedtime stories, which Skeeter listened to intently. Unfortunately, as good of a storyteller as Marty was, he wasn’t a great entrepreneur and thus had to sell the hotel to the misophobic Barry Nottingham (Griffiths). Flash-forward a few decades and Skeeter is working as the handyman at the hotel, which is about to be closed and re-opened in a new location under the management of Barry’s two-faced son-in-law to be Kendall (Pierce). Meanwhile, Skeeter’s straight-arrow principal sister (Cox) is going through the closure of her school and asks Skeeter to look after her two kids in the evening for a week while she interviews for a new spot in Arizona. After tangling with the day sitter, a pretty school teacher named Jill (Russell), Skeeter starts to tell the kids fantasy bedtime stories based on his own life. Inexplicably they start to come true when the kids add their own contributions to the tale, and of course, Skeeter decides to try and use this to his benefit to take over the hotel as Barry had promised his father.

Bedtime Stories is, much like Jim Carrey’s Yes Man which opened a few weeks ago, a return to the old well for Adam Sandler. The script by Matt Lopez and long-time Sandler scribe Tim Herlihy ventures into the kinds of territory that we’ve seen in Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, where Sandler’s character must rise above his current state to save something he loves from a jerk of an adversary. We see a lot of silly gags like in those films as well—witness Bugsy for example, the bizarrely bug-eyed guinea pig who the kids keep as a pet. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it is a formula that has certainly worked for Sandler in the past and generated laughs. Stories is not as funny as those early Sandler classics, but neither is it quite as sophomoric, either. Lopez and Herlihy have clearly put the Disney touch on the film by adding the wish-fulfillment element that practically screams Jiminy Cricket, as well as some sentimental moments that drag the movie a little ways out of the pre-teen demographic. While the film is clearly treading on safe and sanitized ground, for a family film it manages to keep things moving along quite nicely toward the ending we’re all sure will happen.

Of course, as much as this IS a Disney film, it’s also an Adam Sandler vehicle and thus the movie largely rises and falls on his performance. Those expecting anything like his more nuanced, less shtick-y performances in Click or Spanglish will be in for a disappointment. Sandler takes this one all the way back to his goofier roles, hamming it up and having fun doing it. The bedtime story sequences are where he goes the most overboard, and it doesn’t work as well as one might think. Sandler just doesn’t seem right doing the same sort of stuff at forty-two that he did at twenty-nine, and it falls flat on occasion. When he’s playing it down just a slight touch in the “real world” he seems to fare much better in giving the lovable loser thing a spin. All in all it isn’t a bad performance from a man who knows this territory like the back of his hand. His supporting cast—including Keri Russell as romantic interest Jill, Lucy Lawless as bitchy concierge Aspen and Courtney Cox as Skeeter’s sister Wendy—are quite adequate and do exactly what is expected of them and nothing more. There are a few actors who need to be singled out one way or another; Russell Brand and Richard Griffiths tackle their roles as dopey best friend Mickey and boss Barry with more panache then the rest. Brand, who is playing a variation on his dim-witted Aldous Snow from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, will garner the majority of the laughs for adults, while Griffiths gives the same kind of solid comedic work as he does in the Harry Potter series, only far less caustic. Teresa Palmer is a lot of fun to watch (and easy on the eyes) as Barry’s Paris Hilton-esque daughter Violet, and Jonathan Pryce is engaging in the opening sequence and voice-over as father Marty. The one problematic performance from the cast comes from Guy Pearce. Pearce, a very talented dramatic actor, seems completely out of place as the evil rival to Sander and while he tries to match the tone of the movie it just doesn’t seem to work well at all.

Alan Shankman is in very familiar territory here as the director, as he’s sat behind the lens of nothing but comedies. He manages to combine the Disney and Happy Madison sensibilities fairly well into one palette, keeping things slick and bright without venturing too far into any kind of risky territory. One can imagine that he took this to spend time doing something between his last hit, 2007’s Hairspray and its sequel due to come out in a couple years. He adds nothing particularly inventive to this film and instead relies on what’s worked for the studios as a guide to go off of, and that works just fine. The only complaint would have been that he could have added a little more to the storytelling sequences, which are unfortunately the weakest parts of the film when they could have well been the strongest.

The 411: While there's nothing particularly original in Bedtime Stories for those familiar with Adam Sandler's work, that doesn't mean it's unenjoyable. The film takes Sandler's earlier comedic days and blends it with Disney's family-friendly sensibilities to create an enjoyable, if not earth-shattering, experience. Sandler gets the usual support he can expect from a cast who perform admirably and lets the gags run themselves. The end result is a film that, while far from the funniest thing in the comedian's repertoire, manages to entertain and just be some good, fun family times.

Final Score:  6.5   [ Average ]