Review: Just Go With It

Just Go With It isn’t nearly as bad as Grown-Ups. Just Go With It is just stupid. It’s not mean or hateful.

Just Go With Itisn’t nearly as bad as Grown-Ups. Just Go With It is just stupid. It’s not mean or hateful. If it weren’t my job to evaluate it, I wouldn’t really care, but here we are so this is why Just Go With It sucks a little less than Grown-Ups.

Daniel Macabee (Adam Sandler) is a player using the sympathy card when he tells the ladies about his abusive wife. And he’s a plastic surgeon so he has access to lots of hotties. He thinks Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) is actually the right girl for him, but now he’s got to convince her he’s getting divorced, because she’s no home wrecker.

Danny gets his assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to play the ex-wife, but she answers a call from her kids in front of Palmer, so now he’s got to pretend the kids are his. Forget about why Palmer is okay with all this. It’s a bit too soon for any of this to be an issue if you ask me. I mean, meeting the kids on the third date?

Luckily, Katherine’s daughter Maggie (Bailee Madison) is an aspiring actor, so she and Michael (Griffin Gluck) play along. Basically, the whole movie is about bad improv, as an excuse to justify bad improv. If you find liars fumbling for answers funny, then this is the movie for you. Personally, if it’s not Jon Lovitz, I’m not interested. Yeah, I said it.

The easy plastic surgery jokes are lame. They reference “Californication,” Saw and Avatar to show they’re paying attention. They dip into erectile dysfunction and irritable bowel syndrome in act one, and Sandler does 3-4 riffs on the price of shoes in a single scene. When Katherine’s college rival Devlin (Nicole Kidman!) shows up, it’s just embarrassing. I know she thinks she’s appealing to the populist audiences with something like this, but she should at least hold out for a Fockers movie.

Of course, it’s a total shock when Katherine dresses up hot, because you could never tell she’s attractive when she wears T-shirts and sweaters. I mean, my God, she wears glasses! Ugh, glasses, how awful.

You end up realizing halfway through that Sandler just wanted to go back to Hawaii again. They even set that up from the start. I should have caught on. Come on, you already shot a movie there. Go on your own time. There’s actually a hula dance off at the end.

At an hour and 45 minutes, the movie is way too long for this premise. You’ve got to be able to bring this sort of thing in under 90. The first thing they could cut is the awful prologue about Daniel’s cheating fiancé and he Jersey Shore friends and the Maccabee family’s big prosthetic noses. The wedding ring schtick doesn’t need an explanation. It’s just something he does until he meets the right girl.

I’m most disappointed that the trailers make this out to be a much darker, funnier premise. I thought it was supposed to be about Sandler killing off his fake kids for sympathy. The TV spots show the one scene where he announces his plan to make the fake kids disappear. That’s false advertising.