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Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler star in ‘Just Go with It.’
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For one magic moment, Jennifer Aniston looks into Adam Sander’s eyes — and we buy it.
Her character is reciting what she loves about his character, and though they’re in a fake marriage on a “fake-cation,” just competing with a mushier couple, it works. Aniston’s eyes mist over, and Sandler seems like the sort of guy who could get that girl.
But that moment is rare in “Just Go With It,” a struggle of a farce built on a winning combo of two actors who usually can make even the worst comedy a hit.
Nothing about Adam Sandler suggests bedside manner, “successful plastic surgeon” or even college graduate. But Dr. Danny Maccabee’s daffy scenes with patients whose breast implants have burst or whose facelifts have left one eyebrow higher than the other do manage a snicker.
In a prologue, we’ve seen how Danny, then sporting a comically oversize nose, learned the woman he was about to marry 20 years ago was after him for his money. He vowed never to have his heart broken again. How? He keeps the unused wedding ring for bar hook-ups with much younger women interested in a fling with a doughy, dull married man.
Then he meets a 20something school teacher, Palmer (the stunning Brooklyn Decker), and needs to up the ante. She’s Miss Right. He tells her he’s getting a divorce. She wants to meet the soon-to-be-ex-wife. And that’s where Katherine, Dr. Danny’s long-suffering, longtime single-mom assistant, comes in.
Unlikely scenarios pile up as Danny bribes Katherine, then her kids, to lie to Palmer so she’ll marry the lying, conniving and not-that-good-looking doctor.
The best scenes are dinner dates where Danny and Katherine paint each other into a corner with the insulting whoppers they tell Palmer, reasons they’re getting divorced — his erectile dysfunction, her pill-popping, his irritable bowels.
“I got another disease? OK.”
Aniston gets to bombshell up as Dr. Danny spends like a (reluctant) drunken sailor to fit her out in the latest from Rodeo Drive. And they all jet to Hawaii for a vacation the kids blackmail Danny into bankrolling.
Nicole Kidman brings it in the third act, as an old college rival of Katherine’s, but she’s paired with rocker Dave Matthews, who could only be called an “actor” in an Adam Sandler movie. At least the obligatory cameo by Sandler crony Dan Patrick (hula-contest emcee) works better than usual.
Whatever director Dennis Dugan’s virtues are, they are ill-suited to a rom-com co-starring Aniston and ill-suited to one aiming for PG-13. It was an ill wind that advised this cast and crew.
review
What: “Just Go With It”
Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Brooklyn Decker, Nicole Kidman, Dave Matthews
Directed by: Dennis Dugan
Running time: 113 minutes
Rated: PG-13 for crude/sexual content, partial nudity, drug references and language
1/2