BLENDED – The Review

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, who after the success of THE WEDDING SINGER and 50 FIRST DATES, attempt a hat trick and fail with the witless, laugh-free rom-com BLENDED. Their newest collaboration works better as a rom than a com and does have a sweetness that partially compensates for its predictability and meager laughs, but it’s overlong, underwritten and I can’t recommend it.

After a disastrous blind date at Hooters, single parents Lauren (Barrymore) and Jim (Sandler) agree on one thing: they never want to see each other again. But in a convenient, convoluted twist of fate, the pair end up at the same luxurious African safari resort with their families (his three girls – her two boys) and are forced to get along while sharing a suite for a week.

There is nothing I strongly disliked about BLENDED but little to recommend. It goes on far too long – a full two hours. So many scenes could easily been excised – a pointless group massage sequence and an entire creepy subplot with Kevin Nealon and his much younger girlfriend – for a more digestible 90 minutes. There are too many repeated gags with Lauren banging her sleeping son’s head into the wall and Sam’s pretty teen daughter Hillary inexplicably being mistaken for a boy due to her Prince Valiant hairdo. Near the end, a new unnecessary subplot is introduced about Lauren’s ex (Joel McHale) wanting to patch up their marriage. The movie doesn’t know when to end. Somewhere in this mess is a mildly goofball, essentially conservative appreciation of romance, togetherness, and good American fortune – I just wish it had been funny.

BLENDED features the PG-13 Sandler, not the vulgar, dick-and-fart-obsessed, mean-spirited Sandler of stuff like THAT’S MY BOY (which I would have preferred). He delivers here one of his least shtick-reliant performances, mostly playing straight man to the more boisterous kids. There is a subplot about Lauren’s oldest son masturbating to photos of his babysitter and a shot of mating rhinos  so BLENDED is not quite as family-friendly as it sounds. Drew Barrymore tries to compensate for the lousy script by screaming, rolling her eyes, and spastically shaking her hands in front of her face. The weirdest element in BLENDED is a Jamaican-accented Terry Crews, who shows up frequently to dance and croon with a chorus of African men behind him. The film’s writers don’t give him anything funny to sing about so instead he flexes his muscles, bugs out his eyes, and shrieks his lines with inappropriate hostility. Or maybe the weirdest moment is when tranny Alexis Arquette shows up to play his/her organ at a kid’s baseball game. Or maybe it’s the scene is where Lauren and Sam bond over porn mags and tampons at a Walgreens. The all-monkey orchestra would have been less weird if one of the chimps hadn’t been wearing a Hooters outfit. These scenes are odd and kept me awake, but they didn’t make me laugh. I suppose undemanding  fans of Drew and Adam may enjoy the film on some level. The two stars do have pleasant chemistry and this film won’t hurt their careers. There are some moments of relative gravity, mostly involving references to Jim’s late wife and the details of raising his three motherless daughters. Those scenes didn’t make me laugh either but at least they weren’t supposed to. It’s easy to understand how one could be fooled into thinking that BLENDED might be worth a trip to the theater. After all, the trailers contain a couple of funny moments and there’s some potential in the premise. Unfortunately, all of this means little with a final product so half-baked. Sorry to report that BLENDED is simply another lame Adam Sandler comedy.

2 of 5 Stars