The most memorable things in 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler's latest film? The scenery and the walrus.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published February 12, 2004
[Photo: Columbia Pictures]
Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) falls hard for Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore). But her short-term memory loss keeps getting in the way.
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Few movies benefit from their locales as much as 50 First Dates, filmed on location in our 50th state, Hawaii. Not even the unsavory presence of Rob Schneider, a transient comedian hitching another ride on Adam Sandler's star, can spoil the luscious tropical scenery.
Something is wrong with a romantic comedy when the romance and comedy are constantly upstaged by the backgrounds, when location scouts are more vital than actors and their lines.
Practically everything in this movie could have taken place in New York or Los Angeles or any other metro region where movie couples typically, uneasily fall in love. Strip away the sleazy wahine jokes, flowered shirts and pineapple references and 50 First Dates could be filmed anywhere with an aquarium, since Sandler's character works at one caring for a scene-stealing walrus.
Something else is wrong with a movie that gives viewers time to consider that it could have been made somewhere else. Or when a massive mammal with personality to match steals the movie from two of Hollywood's most popular stars.
Sandler plays the same mumbling schlub his fans continually pay to see, this one named Henry Roth. Henry's pastime is bedding tourists and then dumping them, never looking for love and forgetting the connection as soon as he can. Drew Barrymore plays Lucy Whitmore, a perky local resident Henry meets at breakfast and immediately falls for. He gets a dose of his own medicine when Lucy is revealed to be suffering from severe short-term memory loss, the result of an auto accident.
She can't remember him from day to day, so he must meet her again and again for, in essence, the first time. Fifty first dates, and director Peter Segal (Anger Management) seems determined to show us every one.
A lot of belief must be suspended to enjoy Segal's film. We must buy the notion that Lucy's father (Blake Clark) and steroid-fueled brother Doug (Sean Astin overdoing a lisp) exacerbate her condition by purposely reliving the day of her brain injury. It takes an outsider like Henry to make Lucy confront her problem, the core of a movie that wouldn't exist if dad or Doug did what was best for Lucy and themselves.
50 First Dates is a movie content to make people laugh at walrus vomit and Schneider's butt cleavage, where a baseball bat bashing is considered a highlight and a Frau Farbissina ripoff from the Austin Powers series is supposed to be clever. And a kiss at the fade-out that could be predicted in the ticket line is supposed to make it all better. The movie will make a fortune on Valentine's Day weekend, a measure of what constitutes romance these days.
Yet, there is a remarkable passage near the end when 50 First Dates stops lunging for cheap laughs, when this Memento-style gimmick morphs into something approaching true romance. For a few fleeting minutes Sandler bridges the chasm between Happy Gilmore's silliness and Punch-Drunk Love that was too arty for his fans. We get a taste of what he could be in movies, funny, charming and adorably vulnerable despite his aggressively know-it-all attitude. That is, if Sandler weren't so concerned with easy money and skittish about any sign of audience rejection, as in the case of Punch-Drunk Love.
For the most part, however, 50 First Dates is just another Sandler payday, rehashing the same shtick that made him rich. He sings a silly song as usual, makes snide remarks to people he considers less cool than himself as usual and relies solely on the expression of a kid caught robbing the cookie jar for character development as usual. Lucy's lucky. She would forget this movie in the morning.
50 First Dates
Grade: C+
Director: Peter Segal
Cast: Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Rob Schneider, Sean Astin, Blake Clark, Dan Aykroyd
Screenplay: George Wing
Rating: PG-13; crude humor, sexual material, drug abuse, profanity
