Blended

Our story begins pretty much where you’d expect an Adam Sandler movie to begin: in a toilet stall at Hooters. There Lauren (Drew Barrymore) is on the phone to best friend Jen (Wendi McLendon-Covey) trying to escape from a horrible blind date with Jim (Adam Sandler). While they superficially seem to hate each other, there’s been a glimmer of bonding over her line “It’s as weird as Weird Al starring in Weird Science”, so even though their date fizzles we just know they’ll get back together because that’s the point of this two-hour movie. But because this is a two-hour movie, we first have to spend time with their kids.
Lauren has two sons: the older is a masturbator obsessed with his babysitter while the younger is an out-of-control maniac. Jim has three daughters: the eldest, “Larry”, (Bella Thorne) would like to be interested in boys, but the horrible haircut and clothes her father has given her has everyone hilariously thinking she’s a boy. The middle one talks to their dead mum and the youngest one seems pretty normal but clearly craves a woman’s touch. Then they all go to Africa as part of some holiday scam that the movie doesn’t even try to explain properly – are they pretending to be the people the holiday was bought for (his boss and Jen), or did they just take the tickets? This probably isn’t racist, but at times – oh look, copulating rhinos – it kind of feels like it is, while Sandler’s increasingly sloppy hand when it comes to comedy doesn’t help matters any. Everyone gets to fix everyone else’s problems long before the film drags itself over the finishing line, and while there are a lot of terrible scenes in this film the real problem isn’t the lame “wacky” moments – listing all the terrible things that happen in this film would make it sound way more interesting than it really is – but that it’s boring.
There’s no real obstacles preventing Lauren and Jim from getting together after the first half hour, and Sandler and Barrymore’s real chemistry means the film’s best scenes are the ones where they’re having fun together so having to wait an hour and a half for them to actually become a couple feels like adding insult to injury. Grievous injury at that.
Written by Anthony Morris