Adam Sandler is having an identity crisis. After years of highly successful comedies full of lowbrow, juvenile humor, the comedian is trying his best to grow up, dabbling in serious drama (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish) while infusing his mainstream comedies with a serious strain of sentimentality, most evident in his two collaborations with Drew Barrymore, The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. Now, with Click, Sandler moves even closer to becoming the new Robin Williams, tugging on audiences' funny bones and heartstrings with an equal lack of subtlety.
At least he seems to have moved on from his standard role as uncouth man-child—as in Spanglish, Sandler here plays a husband and father who works hard at his creative white-collar profession (in this case, he's an architect). But spending so much time at work so he can provide for his family means that Sandler's Michael has little time for wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale) or their two school-age kids. Like every harried movie dad, Michael misses important sporting events and family trips, is late for dinner and spends too much time on his cell phone talking to his smarmy boss (David Hasselhoff).
But then a mysterious mad scientist named Morty (Christopher Walken, doing his best Christopher Walken) offers Michael the gift of a lifetime: a universal remote that controls his life. Soon he's fast-forwarding through fights with his wife, muting the annoying people around him and watching a jogger's breasts jiggle in slo-mo. He's in heaven, but as anyone who's ever seen a movie knows, no such gift comes without a price.
The first half of the movie, with Michael discovering all the joys of the remote, is fitfully amusing, even if Sandler can't resist fart jokes and people getting kicked in the groin. But when the remote starts wreaking havoc with Michael's life and the film itself fast-forwards years and decades into the future, the schmaltz and heavy-handed lessons come out in full force, and things become a lot less funny.
Like It's a Wonderful Life for the TiVo generation, Click hawks simple morals about appreciating what you have and not taking your family for granted. Michael works too much, so of course he has to learn the consequences of neglecting his wife and kids, and that spending all your time at the office robs you of the chance to appreciate the little things in life.
Sandler comedies have always had lessons of some sort, but in Click the sentiment is at least as important as the jokes, if not more so. The further the film pushes Michael into the future, the more the characters we got to know in the first half of the movie fade into the background. By the time a gray-haired Michael wakes up from cancer surgery, you know they've gone a little too far with the emotional manipulation.
Worst of all, Sandler looks lost throughout the film, going through the motions on both his tired humor and the woefully predictable plot mechanics. At his best, Sandler can be sweet and goofily endearing, as he has been with Barrymore, but his relationship with Beckinsale is based almost exclusively on bickering, and Michael's eventual turnaround is so expected that it's not particularly satisfying. Sandler's fans may find some of his antics entertaining, but once the film turns on the waterworks, even they'll want to click away.