Let’s at least agree that the single best line in any Adam Sandler movie remains, “If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.” Do you even want context? Does it help at all to know that these words are delivered, totally straight, by a random elderly woman in the midst of 1995’s bawdy man-child-gets-girl comedy Billy Madison? And that Sandler, in what Lady Bird would describe as “the titular role,” had just won a foxy lady’s affection by pretending to wet himself and then shouting, “YESSSS! YOU AIN’T COOL UNLESS YOU PEE YOUR PANTS!” in order to protect a bullied third-grader? (The heartwarming soundtrack swells, the foxy lady swoons, and Sandler, with his guileless half-grin and backward baseball cap, looks disconcertingly like one of the Beastie Boys.) Or is knowledge of any kind—knowledge of history, knowledge of self, knowledge of just what the hell is happening onscreen—a liability to enjoying this guy’s movies?
Anyway. “AWWWWWW!” yells Billy Madison, recoiling from the elderly lady. “THAT WAS THE GROSSEST THING I EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE. LE’S GO!” Then he herds all the other kids onto a school bus driven by Chris Farley. Incredible scene. Incredible movie.
Billy Madison hastened Adam Sandler’s ascent to bulletproof comedy royalty, the capstone to a vibrant and wildly influential five-year run on Saturday Night Live and a logical progression from his double-platinum 1993 comedy album, They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! (Which turns 25 this year, yikes.) Sandler and Farley both left SNL in ’95 (not by choice) and turned to their supernova film careers, which for Sandler meant a flabbergasting run of low-budget, usually critically reviled hits like 1996’s Happy Gilmore (man-child golf prodigy gets girl), 1998’s The Waterboy (man-child football prodigy gets girl), and 1999’s Big Daddy (man-child lawyer gets girl). He stuck with that formula even when it stopped working, as with the 2000 flop Little Nicky (man-child literal son of Satan gets girl). He’s still sticking with it, in fact. Except almost two decades later, he’s sticking with it entirely on Netflix, where he might just be more influential than ever.
Sandler screams and barks and hoots and coos through all those movies and most of the ones he’s made since, a one-man bestiary of funny voices, a sentimental potty-humor savant so sweet and unguarded he puts the pure in puerile. His Netflix alliance—Sandler signed an exclusive four-picture deal in 2014, noting in a statement that he did so because Netflix rhymed with wet chicks—was a prescient business deal seemingly designed to let him keep slumming with even less oversight than usual. The first three films—2015’s The Ridiculous 6, 2016’s The Do-Over, and 2017’s Sandy Wexler—were met primarily with outrage and derision, though at least one broke a record for the most-watched Netflix movie. (According to Netflix.) The fourth and final film in the deal—The Week Of, a mismatched-family wedding comedy costarring Chris Rock—premieres on Friday, and seems unlikely to either win over his many critics or disappoint his many, many fans.
Meanwhile, Sandler’s doing a quick arena mini-tour to film an upcoming Netflix stand-up special, which looks to be a charmingly half-assed affair, based on the show I caught Tuesday night in Columbus, Ohio. It was roughly 20 percent conventional stand-up, 50 percent his trademark twee songlets that still sound made up on the spot, and 30 percent pure goofball rambling that ranged from the aging process (“Ever look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, no, man, I disagree’?”) to his detailed handjob advice (“Go up”) to his ongoing disinclination to ever leave the house. The whole thing was very stupid (he did two takes of a quick sex-jam song that ends with him singing the words pussy fart) and overwhelmingly serene. It was also, somehow, kind of great.
No man is more indomitably himself than Adam Sandler; few comedians of any era have created a wider gulf between popular demand and critical dismay. His house contains many mansions, and there are multiple whoopie cushions lining every chair in all of them. He is compulsively watchable even when his movies, strictly speaking, are not; his Netflix adventures have not so much improved his stature as emboldened him to not bother with the notion of improvement at all.
But his biggest weapon as a comedian and movie star is neither plot nor characterization nor even, strictly speaking, jokes—it’s his singular vibe, equal parts tranquil and profoundly crass, a rarefied sort of idiot-savant oxygen only he can breathe. Sometimes the result is wildly offensive; sometimes it’s borderline unbearable. But at the right dosage his approach can still bring a stupified sort of total contentment. Is there anything else—anything different—that we want from Adam Sandler in 2018? And based on his recent work and all the further success it has brought him, quality be damned, why on earth would he care?
Let’s at least agree that the best Netflix-exclusive movie starring Adam Sandler is Noah Baumbach’s 2017 dysfunctional-family dramedy The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), in which Sandler’s childlike volatility is played for both laughs and prestige-film feels. It’s not the first time, nor, hopefully, the last.
Dustin Hoffman plays a pompous minor sculptor and neglectful father; Sandler plays one of his screwed-up adult kids, which involves him violently blurting out stuff like “I’m parking, asshole!” and “Just let me eat my fuckin’ banana, OK?” Sandler is, of course, absurdly perfect for the role. As with 2002’s polarizing but still quite striking Paul Thomas Anderson joint Punch-Drunk Love—Sandler’s first attempt at a Serious Role—the trick is to get him playing just a slightly calmer and more somber version of his usual self, spacing his volcanic eruptions further apart and thus quadrupling the impact. Ben Stiller plays the other screwed-up son, and his man-child pairing with Sandler is inspired, whether they’re haplessly trashing a car in a hospital parking lot or wrestling in the grass outside an art opening. In an earlier, much quieter moment, Sandler sits at the piano, playing a goofy duet with his college-bound daughter (Grace Van Patten), and you just melt into the floor with joy.
Why doesn’t he do movies like this all the time? Or do they work only as very occasional bits of contrast to the bawdier, cruddier films that he’s now pumping out year after year? Judd Apatow’s scouring 2009 meta-comedy Funny People, of course, grappled with that very question in a barely fictionalized manner. Sandler is George Simmons, a famous comedian with a well-known reputation for slumming it and an unpublicized terminal illness, both of which have left him isolated and depressed. “I think you fucked up—I don’t think you should’ve took that medicine,” Eminem (as himself, naturally) tells him. “I don’t know, personally I think you should’ve just let yourself die. Honestly, man, what’re you gonna do now? Make another bullshit movie? Fuck another chick who doesn’t like you?” In real life, Sandler has been happily married for 15 years, but to the movie, this is trivia. Within 30 seconds of screen time, Eminem is yelling “Would you like to fuck me?” at Ray Romano across a crowded restaurant. It’s a rich tapestry.
The central appeal of Sandler’s many, many bullshit movies—2011’s ultra-shrill Jack and Jill is generally considered his nadir—is how chummy they are, how the same actors reoccur to the point where these legitimately feel like loosely scripted family reunions. (Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2, both costarring Rock, David Spade, and Kevin James, have been derided in particular as celebrity vacations masquerading as movies, like a no-brow spin on the Ocean’s Eleven series.) This is a classic case where the people onscreen are often plainly having more fun than the people watching, but Sandler’s distinct brand of laid-back majesty is still an exhilarating wave when you catch it right: low stakes but high reward. This is all perfect for Netflix, where the ideal movie doesn’t so much bowl you over as simply keep you company.
If absolutely nothing else, you’re guaranteed to see a few old friends. Sometimes that’s all you get, of course. It’s supposed to be delightful when Torsten Voges, the lanky German actor who plays the heavily accented doctor roasted at great length by Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People (”I keep thinking you’re gonna be torturing James Bond later”), shows up in The Do-Over as an actual action-flick villain and slapstick torturer. But that would suggest The Do-Over is capable of inspiring delight.
Sandler’s Netflix movies are not abominations, but none of them rank with his best work, or even his more tolerable work. The Do-Over, for my subscription money, is the worst thus far, crass and sour and erratic. Sandler and Spade reconnect at their high school reunion, commiserate over their failed adult lives and the shrill, hateful women who populate them, and stumble into a fake-your-own-death travelogue that’s part feature-length Schmitts Gay ad and part D-plus Bruce Willis shootout in which they somehow wind up chasing an actual cure for cancer. Paula Patton plays a grieving widow and Spade’s love interest (“She needs a nice dick to cry on,” Sandler counsels); Luis Guzmán’s ball sweat figures prominently. Patton has a climactic catfight with another, equally mistreated lady (Kathryn Hahn, sheesh) set to Madonna’s “Crazy for You.” Don’t watch this.
Shame on you, though, if you stumbled onto this movie and expected any sort of enlightenment. The Ridiculous 6 set the template for this new Netflix era of Sandler, a bizarre mix of harmless and wildly offensive. A group of offended Native American actors walked off the set; Sandler plays a seeming orphan raised by an Indian tribe to be a knife-wielding super-assassin with a fiancée, Smoking Fox (Julia Jones), who is variously described as a “sweet piece of red prairie meat,” “your Injun whore,” and “Poca-Hot-Tits.” This is supposed to be a goofy ragtag-misfit Western, but everyone from constant Sandler sidekick Rob Schneider to Vanilla Ice (as Mark Twain!) to Terry Crews to Harvey Keitel struggles mightily with the slapstick. (Accosted by TMZ at the airport, Vanilla Ice allowed that the film wasn’t exactly Dances With Wolves, and admitted he could understand why some people took offense, given that he himself was “part Choctaw.”) Yeah, maybe don’t watch this either.
What The Ridiculous 6 and The Do-Over have in common is that Sandler’s character is a gun- or knife-wielding badass in both, his beloved menagerie of dirty-puppet-show voices mostly set aside for a tough-guy growl that isn’t too convincing even if it’s supposed to be unconvincing. This suggests a deliberate pivot, a late-career attempt at B-movie beat-’em-up stardom, like a Naked Gun–style sendup of John Wick. But most likely it’s nothing that calculated: Just your old pal Adam fucking around as usual. Indeed, last year’s Sandy Wexler, in a character sense at least, proved more conventional: Once again in the titular role, Sandler is a bumbling 1990s talent manager with a vast collection of SNL-character tics (clunky glasses, braying laugh, terrible table manners) who is both helpless and a heart-of-gold genius: He discovers Jennifer Hudson’s character singing in an ugly-duckling costume at Six Flags, and turns her into a Grammy-winning superstar instantaneously, bumbling half-comedically all the while. He’s indispensable, but he also kind of sucks. In that sense, the role ain’t exactly a stretch.
It all gets to feeling like Bad Grandpa reimagined as a romantic comedy; the movie is well over two hours long and stops dead periodically so Sander and Hudson can flirt wanly at a driving range or something. (Their tepid chemistry together makes you long for Drew Barrymore, costar of perhaps Sandler’s most crowd- and critic-pleasing work in 1998’s The Wedding Singer and 2004’s 50 First Dates.) But in its slackness, its anarchic rhythmlessness, its shameless procession of cameos, and its handful of inspired images—a trio of Dobermans gnawing on a gigantic pile of Chili’s baby-back ribs, say—it hints at the inspired WTF chaos of yore. I kept hoping the Miles Davis lady would show up. Sandy Wexler isn’t totally free of Sandler’s penchant for problematic antics: A central, uneasy theme of all Sandler’s movies is that Rob Schneider can play any ethnicity, with any sort of altered skin tone, anytime. But directed, like The Do-Over, by fellow longtime lowbrow Sandler cohort Steven Brill, it’s as close as Sandler has come to trying to manufacture his own prestige-movie turn without a name auteur to guide him.
Possibly the central idea here is that Sandler and Netflix are uncommonly suited for each other, in that he specializes in precisely the sort of loud but passive, flashy but cheap, not-great-but-who-cares stunts that aren’t so much movies as half-cynical Events on the order of Bright or The Cloverfield Paradox. Something about the very act of firing up a movie on Netflix feels ultra-casual and pointedly prestige-averse: It somehow feels like an insult to your intelligence if the people onscreen are putting on airs or for that matter trying at all. All these years later, his movies still feel like overgrown and undercooked SNL sketches, the seams visible, the tone erratic, the comedy actually sharper when the entire conceit threatens to collapse. The whole point of a Netflix-exclusive movie is you aren’t supposed to think too hard about it; you don’t even have to really watch it while you’re watching it. It is dismaying to think that Sandler has no greater aspirations. But he does a Meyerowitz Stories just often enough to keep you wondering, and even at his corniest and most relaxed, there might be more aspiration lurking there than it appears.
Taping parts of his standup special in Columbus on Tuesday night, Sandler was very much in his element, and the sizable crowd—filling most of the Schottenstein Center, Ohio State’s basketball arena, minus the upper deck—was very much in his element, too. “Everyone in this room is now dumber,” goes the classic Billy Madison gag, but this is a feature, not a bug. He called it “the Schlongenstein Center.” He bragged that his sex life with his wife is robust, and that their “safe word” is really? He lamented that his testicles are growing as he ages. (“I’m 51 years old. My dick literally looks like it’s sitting in a beanbag chair.”) He attempted standard quasi-topical humor—“Ever been in one of those Teslas?” “Ever have a friend who rescues too many animals?”—but fared better the less conventional sense he made. He referred to himself, constantly, as “The Sandman.” And he did it with those trademark jumps from low-energy mumbling to CARTOONISH SHOUTING, which triggered fresh waves of delight every time.
The show’s backbone, such as it is, consists of dinky little songs that make the Lonely Island look virtuosic by comparison, with conceits that seem way too thin—choruses range from “My kid’s only got one line in a play” to “My Uber driver smells bad”—but prove shockingly durable. The same dude in the crowd shouted for the They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! track “At a Medium Pace” on four different occasions, but Sandler played only one golden oldie in full: an updated “The Hanukkah Song.”
That the rest of the material was unfamiliar and still a little shaky didn’t bother anyone. Stupid grins abounded. Adam Sandler’s peak talent is how quickly he can traverse the distance between This is it? and This is enough. His spiritual Wi-Fi requires no password, and automatically blocks McSweeney’s, The Economist, Vice, The New York Review of Books, and, of course, Metacritic. (From a very loopy and lovely song dedicated to his wife: “When I’m on a diet you take all my potatoes / Say ‘fuck all those guys’ when you read Rotten Tomatoes.”)
The Columbus show climaxed with a quite excellent electric-guitar solo from Sandler himself during a quite moving tribute to the guy he considers the single funniest comedian he ever worked with: Chris Farley. Sandler sings it like an earnest, grizzled classic rocker, and as always the silliness and sincerity mix in an utterly disarming way, a man-child dressed up in an adult’s clothes but replicating an adult’s outsized emotions. Here’s one true-story verse:
I saw him at the office, crying with his headphones on
Listenin’ to a K.C. and the Sunshine Band song
I said, “Buddy, how the fuck is that making you so sad?”
He laughed and said, “Just thinkin’ about my dad”
That he doesn’t deliver the song as a tragedy only makes it more tragic. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry, hard to tell if we should expect more from Adam Sandler, or if it means more when he gives you more only on his own terms, in his own due time. Near the end of the song, he paid Farley the highest compliment he could pay anyone: “You’re a legend like you wanted, but I wish you were still here with me / And we were getting on a plane to go shoot”—big jump to cartoon falsetto—“Grown Ups 3.” The crowd roared. They would totally have watched that movie, and loved it, even if—especially if—critics had hated it. Sandler at his best is populism in its purest, sweetest form, a cautionary tale about thinking too hard about someone whose primary gift to the world is that he never seems to be thinking very hard at all.
