Nope: THE DO-OVER

Has a movie star ever done less on screen than Sandler in any of his recent lackadaisical performances where he’s little more than a black hole of energy and appeal? Maybe, even after years of scraping near the bottom of the barrel with the dire likes of Grown Ups 2 and Blended, it was combined impact of the relative box office disappointment of his hard-R, but twisted funny, That’s My Boy in 2012 and the bad luck to stretch dramatic chops in two total flops, 2014’s Men Women & Children and 2015’s The Cobbler, that pushed him to do less than the bare minimum. Since then he’s slept through an action comedy (Pixels) and a western parody (The Ridiculous 6), each worse than the last. And each time around he fades under the spotlight, committing less and less to silly voices or high-concept goofiness. He lets the supporting players and desperate flop-sweat gross out gags do the heavy lifting while he appears to look forward to the next time the director calls cut so he can get on with his life.

I dutifully fired up Netflix to sample The Do-Over, the streaming service’s second film from a four-picture deal with Sandler. (Creatively it’s their worst original programming move, but since they keep the numbers secret there’s no telling if it pays off financially.) I quickly found that any attempt to write about it would be putting more thought and effort into it than anyone involved did. The story concerns two unlucky dopes (Sandler, sleepwalking, and David Spade, playing against type as a timid dummy instead of a sarcastic dummy) who fake their deaths to escape their miserable lives only to discover the plan goes awry when they end up in a conspiracy involving cancer drugs. If you think it sounds a bit more complicated than the typical Sandler material, you’d be mistaken. It’s a collection of dumb complications, sloppily plotted, lazily performed, and shot with all the flat visual interest of a stock photo with the watermark still attached. What would be worse: if Sandler has stopped trying, or if this is really the best he can do?

Why does it exist? Is it for the product placement, logos for cell phones and beers and others in a parade of brands prominently displayed? Is it to get attractive women, extras and featured performers (like Paula Patton) alike, in tight dresses, low-cut shirts, and bikinis? Is it to get Netflix to bankroll a trip? Long scenes take place on a tropical island, or in swimming pools, so it’s also another of his paid vacations with a little bit of a film shoot on the side. He’s brought along a host of his usual pals in front of the camera (Spade, Nick Swardson) and behind the scenes (director Steven Brill, veteran of Little Nicky and Mr. Deeds, lackluster comedies that seem better in retrospect compared to this).  It’s such a flaccid, baggy, boring movie, working in cameos for all sorts of people I just felt sorry for, like Kathryn Hahn, Sean Astin, Michael Chiklis, and Matt Walsh. I felt worst for the great character actor Luis Guzmán, who has an embarrassing scene involving sweaty testicles, one of many desperate R-rated jokes fruitlessly attempting to yank some life into this dud.

And then if you happen to take the story seriously for even one second, the whole thing is even worse than the lack of laughs and narrative or visual interest. It’s wrapped in toxic masculinity’s misogynistic expression, blaming the characters’ misfortunes entirely on women who exclusively wish to torment, tease, trick, and otherwise torture the men in their lives. It ends with Spade repeatedly punching a woman in the stomach while shouting, “I’m sick of women lying to me!” The whole thing’s nothing you couldn’t get if you asked a dozen of the worst commenters on a shady website to write a screenplay about how much they feel wronged by women. If out of perverse curiosity you end up watching this movie you have my condolences. To review Sandler films is too often an exercise in finding rock bottom move ever lower.

Cloudy with a Chance: INTO THE STORM

Junky but compelling, Into the Storm provides a chance to marvel at nature’s power from the comfort of a dopey B-movie perspective. It’s a cheap disaster movie that delivers exactly what it promises and not a bit more. The characters are flat, the story is thin, the dialogue is perfunctory, and the cinematography is clean, clear, and unremarkable. But this half found-footage disaster movie from the director of one of the better Final Destination sequels is exactly what you’d expect that to be. It’s full of howling winds and shattering debris in a loud sound mix as the tiny humans scramble for safety. Buildings break apart, vehicles go flying, and people hold on for dear life as the tornadoes roar by.

The plot is as simple as they come, with generic characters situated in shallow subplots about to converge with the impending intense depictions of very bad weather. Storm chaser documentarians (Matt Walsh, Sarah Wayne Callies, Arlen Escarpeta, and Jeremy Sumpter) want a great shot from inside the eye of a tornado and have the heavy-duty vehicles to prove they mean business. A teenage boy (Max Deacon) wants to impress his hot classmate (Alycia Debnam Carey) by helping with her video project homework. A high school vice principal (Richard Armitage) decides to continue with an outdoor graduation despite the forecast and asks his son (Nathan Kress) to help record the ceremony. A couple of drunken backwoods amateur daredevils (Kyle Davis and Jon Reep) want to catch viral video fame.

So thinly characterized they make the folks in Twister seem Shakespearean, these people will soon be caught up in what is to be the Biggest Tornado of All Time. Luckily, they’re all holding cameras. Director Steven Quale cuts their suspiciously professional amateur footage into the usual wide shots of destruction as he marshals CGI storm resources. We watch as the sky builds ominous dark clouds that let loose thunder and lightening, hailstones the size of golf balls, and gusts of wind. Then come the funnel clouds. Lip service to climate change and shifting weather patterns appears once or twice, but really this is all about staging whirling storm clouds and staring in gaping wonder at their destructive dominance. It’s impressive. A pickup slams through a building, grounded planes tumble, a bus bends in two, a school’s roof gets ripped off, and power lines go flying. It’s scary stuff pulpily portrayed.

As the storm escalates, more and more tornadoes descend upon this small town in anonymous anywhere America. The exact location is suspiciously vague, as even weather maps and CNN reports fail to mention where we are, although viewers from southeastern Michigan will surely recognize metro Detroit weatherman Chuck Gaidica talking Doppler Radar on TV in the background of a couple scenes. Anyway, it’s a worst-case scenario weather parable, so the precise place doesn’t matter. It’s all about collapsing an abandoned factory, or creating a towering cloud of fire in a swirl of wind, or letting several funnels merge to create the aforementioned harrowing climactic Biggest Tornado of All Time. It worked on my soft spot for disaster movies pretty well.

It’s barely 89 minutes long with credits, and runs through its scenarios quickly and efficiently. The found-footage gimmick is haphazardly deployed and never really works, but the effects and sound design are good enough to overpower. The characters may be bland and overfamiliar, but screenwriter John Swetnam supplies a dose of manipulation – two sets of separated parents and children, a race-against-the-clock buried-in-rubble scenario, an old man and a dog who are briefly missing – to maintain something of a human interest. It’s transparent. When one side character is told to think of getting back home to his (never seen or heard) girlfriend, you know he’s a goner.

I can’t quite recommend the movie, but if the idea of watching storms swallow up pretty stock characters while smashing apart small town America in scary ways sounds like a good time, well, some of us think it is. Weather goes wild and people shout laughable lines and run into exaggerated situations that are nonetheless gripping in the way the cheesiest disaster movies can still manage real scares through the unimaginable horror and beauty of distant devastation growing ever closer. One moment late in the film typifies the B-movie charms it supplies. A man in a car is sucked up, up, and away into the tornado. For one brief shot, he sits above the clouds, staring in surprise and wonder at the sight before him before plummeting to his death. It’s dumb, but effective.