Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

My main man Adam Sandler puts out movies just slightly south of the output that Nicholas Cage puts out movies and considering what these cats get paid to put out these movies, who can blame them? Like Nic’s movies most of Adam’s movies haven’t been all that good and I would maintain that Adam’s comedies haven’t been all that funny since ‘The Waterboy’ though his dramas have fared better. Unlike Nic however, people still pay good money to see Adam Sandler movies and as such it is our hope that this movie ‘Just Go With It’ succeeds where ‘Grown Ups’ failed and that would be the simple task of making me laugh. That’s all I want. Well, ‘Just Go With It’ succeeded in this, and for that we are most thankful… but…

Sandler narrates as famed Hollywood plastic surgeon Danny Mccabee who twenty five years ago discovered his future wife to be was a cheating whore. Distraught and unmarried, Danny goes to drown his sorrows at a local pub and surprisingly finds a hottie sympathetic to his plight and now the wedding ring stays on 24-7 because young single hot women love men wearing a wedding ring. Uh… okay. I’m going to heed the title and just go with that.

Today Danny has a thriving practice with his office managed by potentially the world’s hottest assistant in Katherine (Jennifer Anniston)… oh wait, she’s not hot. She’s plain and frumpy. I imagine I’m supposed to just go with that too. Katherine has two completely adorable kids in Maggie (Bailee Madison) and Michael (Griffin Gluck) and life is good, everybody gets along and Danny and his wedding ring never spends a single weekend alone as he shares his secrets and insecurities with his completely not hot office manager.

Then Danny meets Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), a Seventeen magazine reading, N’sync loving elementary school teacher. They spend a night of love on the beach, Palmer finds out Danny’s married which of course he’s not, wacky shenanigans proceed to ensue at an alarming rate with Danny coercing his completely not hot office manager to pretend to be his now hot ex-wife. This leads to Danny having to bribe the officer manager’s kids into pretending to be his kids, which leads to a trip to Hawaii to swim

with the dolphins… it’s complicated… which leads to Danny’s cousin Eddie (Nick Swardson) rescuing a sheep, followed by a gigantic Nicole Kidman showing up in a glorified cameo… seriously, what is Nicole Kidman? Around 6’3"… 6’4"? Eventually, to the surprise of no one over the age of three, the office manager and the doctor find love. This occurs around the same time the office manager put on her bikini. Apparently, until that moment, no one in this movie had any idea that she was hot. Needless to say, just go with it.

I don’t know if I’ve quite had an experience while watching a movie like the experience I had while watching ‘Just Go With It’. For starters this movie is way too long. I mean it goes on forever and ever and ever. On the other hand I laughed out loud many times during this film’s egregious length. Many times. So in one moment I’m sitting in my not so comfortable multiplex chair going ‘GUFFFAW, GUFFAW, GUFFAW’ and then maybe two minutes later my mind wanders, I’m thinking I need to find better ways to use my time, completely wishing this movie would hurry up and end, only to be broken down a few minutes later by yet another crazy funny moment. And it pretty much went like that for the entire two hour running time of this entirely too long wacky romantic comedy.

The title of the movie is ‘Just Go With It’ and while one would think that this is simply the title for a movie, I’m guessing while the powers that be were putting this little ditty together at some point one of the writers had to have asked ‘Do you seriously think they (the audience) are going to go with this?’ With another writer chiming in with ‘Oh hell no… unless (ding)… unless we tell them to… Just Go With It!’ And thus a title for a movie was born. This movie is so ridiculously stupid for almost its entire running time that there were stretches of this movie where it became physically painful to watch. I kid you not, this movie made my knee hurt. Probably the Shopping Montage made my knee hurt the most. I was actually watching a Shopping Montage in an Adam Sandler movie. Unbelievable.

But as I said earlier, my only hope upon entering the theater was that this movie made me laugh. It did that. It did that consistently. As stupid as this movie was, and at no point did it ever become un-stupid, it was funny. Sandler is funny, Swardson is funny, the kids are funny, Dave Matthews was funny, a couple of cameo comedy actors show up and they’re funny too. Jennifer Anniston is almost never funny in a movie, including the thirty five years she spent on ‘Friends’, but Jennifer Anniston could very well be the best working Straight Woman in movies today. She can set up a funny joke like few others.

Thus I must stick to my previous requirement. If I had asked for a movie that was funny AND wasn’t stupidly painful then I’d have to be harder on ‘Just Go With It’. I didn’t ask for that. I got what I asked for. Next time I know what to ask for.