50 First Dates (2004)

Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler in "50 First Dates,"
a tedious, unfunny romantic comedy.

The best scene in “50 First Dates” is really more surprising than funny. It takes place when Drew Barrymore’s character, an otherwise naïve and innocuous single girl, delivers an extended and merciless beating to Rob Schneider’s pot-smoking, half-blind drifter using a baseball bat. The irony is that the movie also features Adam Sandler, better known for being the angry, hostile, often violent man-child center of such dismal titles like “Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore” and “Anger Management.”

That Sandler remains on the sideline during such a moment of pugilism is telling. In the film, he plays Henry, a zoo veterinarian attempting to win over Lucy (Barrymore), an artist and painter left with some kind of short term memory condition after a car accident. They meet cute at a diner in Hawaii and Henry is sure that sparks have flown between them; but when he returns to woo Lucy again the next day, she can’t remember him.

And that sets the stage for this peculiar and tedious romantic comedy directed by Peter Segal. Undeterred by her diagnosis, Henry remains determined to stay in pursuit of this love interest, exercising various gimmicks—like a tape full of scenes of them together for her to watch each day—to help her remember him. In stark contrast to most of his other screen personas, this is the kinder, gentler Adam Sandler.

The problem is that the kinder, gentler Sandler still isn’t very interesting. For all of his success, he remains an actor with a very limited range of expression, annoyingly grimacing and mumbling his way through scenes when he’s not screaming or beating someone up. And Barrymore, though likable, is equally inconsequential as an actress. Reunited after “The Wedding Singer,” they seem to have that nice, easy chemistry of two people content with being little more than box office stars.

Along with the interminably unfunny Schneider, “50 First Dates” includes other actors—like Sean Astin as a buffoonish, steroid-infused narcissist—in the kind of dreary, dumb bit parts that signal desperation at the screenplay level rather than genuine inspiration. For Segal, who directed “Tommy Boy” and other similarly mindless comedies with former SNL stars, this is hardly a departure. You know a movie is in trouble when the character with the most engaging personality is a walrus.