D-
The blandly generic title turns out to be one of the least irritating things about this astonishingly bad remake of “Cactus Flower,” a would-be comedy that’s not just cruelly unfunny but sloppily made.
The piece began as a French play and was transformed first into a Broadway hit by Abe Burrows (with Lauren Bacall, Barry Nelson and Brenda Vaccaro) and then by I.A.L. Diamond and Gene Saks into the successful 1969 movie starring Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn. The premise was always tissue-thin: a dentist pretends to be married in order to keep his young girlfriend from getting too serious, but when he wants to wed her, she demands to meet his wife. So he persuades his devoted nurse to impersonate her. In the end, of course, he and the nurse wind up together.
As reworked by Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling, the dentist has become Danny, a plastic surgeon—presumably to allow for some grotesque visual jokes—and the piece has been “opened up” by moving much of the action to Hawaii, where he, the two women (Katherine, the nurse, and Palmer, the new girlfriend), Katherine’s two kids Maggie and Michael, and Eddie, a pal of the doctor’s (pretending to be the “wife’s” new lover) go on vacation for reasons too complicated to rehearse here. And there they run into the nurse’s erstwhile sorority sister Devlin and her husband Ian.
The changes allow for plenty of mildly raunchy gags but also transform the piece into as much a family comedy as a romantic one. The presence of the children—a pretty obnoxious pair played by Bailee Madison (who sports a dreadful—and pointless—Cockney accent) and pallid Griffin Gluck—really dominates things, overshadowing the triangle that was at the core of the original.
But as bad as the kid stuff is, one minds it less because the three adults have so little to offer. Sandler is terrible as Danny, merely repeating his familiar shtick for the umpteenth time, looking flabby and stiff and mouthing his dull lines with a smarmy sneer and self-conscious manner that seem to be saying to the audience, “See how funny I am?” Why a fellow so annoyingly one-note on screen would choose to invite comparison to Matthau (and earlier to Gary Cooper in “Mr. Deeds”) is beyond understanding. As Katherine Jennifer Aniston fares little better. She can actually act, of course, but the script gives her nothing to work with, forcing her into crudely (and embarrassingly) farcical mode all too often. As for the girlfriend, a role that earned Hawn an Oscar, model Brooklyn Decker is pretty but dull; she resembles nobody more than the young Bo Derek, and shows just about as much acting ability.
The supporting players are similarly ill-used. Nicole Kidman is wasted as Devlin, a part that seems suited to somebody like Ruta Lee, and as her husband Dave Matthews is saddled with a character turn at the close that’s one of the most implausible—and gratuitously tasteless—in recent memory. As for Nick Swardson as Eddie, the poor guy is forced to affect the movie’s second bad accent—some sort of quasi-German monstrosity—as well as engage in a good deal of puerile slapstick, particularly in a sequence involving a supposedly dead sheep.
But one shouldn’t blame the actors too much; they’re operating under the disadvantage of Dennis Dugan’s direction. Simply put, Dugan’s never proven himself capable of imposing any rhythm or style on his pictures, and here his work is even more flaccid and clumsy than usual. Of course, nobody could have brought much verve to so scattershot a script, which doesn’t bother with even the most rudimentary levels of logic or plausibility. But other hands might have camouflaged the lapses more skillfully. The technical side of the movie is also mediocre; Theo Van de Sande’s cinematography is stolid and garish, and the editing by Tom Costain is especially flawed, resulting in a picture as lumpy and shambling as Sandler himself.
It’s impossible to resist the obvious play on that unfortunate title: Just don’t go to it.