Click
(Blu-ray)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: C Feature: C-
Adam
Sandler is more hit or miss than ever before.
He has the occasional hit, but his last one was a recycling of The Longest Yard, so all he has is his
name and the audience for that name may be becoming impatient. Click
has as its premise the idea that a wacky electronics genius (Christopher
Walken) has and gives a special remote control to the young father (Sandler)
for which he can manipulate time and space.
Something like this could be used to help mankind, prevent terrorist
attacks and anything more productive than being selfish and goofy with it. Of course, we get 107 minutes of selfish and
goofy with no point.
We learn
what a bad father and husband he has been and instead of even looking at this
comically, it just becomes a series of remarkably unfunny and overly obvious
gags with semi-hip Sandler supposedly there to remind us to be funny. The Steve Koren/Mark O’Keefe screenplay is a mess
and confined to comedy as bad as the worse TV sitcoms and reality TV, which is
where the remote control idea likely originated. Everyone but Walken seems bored and the #1
sign of desperation is sticking Sandler in a fat suit at least a decade after Eddie
Murphy did it before it became unfunny.
Maybe if
his character had been stung repeatedly by a beehive, that could have been
funny, but that would have been too much effort on the makers. The final issue is, if you have a wife that
is nice and looks like Kate Beckinsale who Sandler and co. actually landed for
the film and you are a bad husband, don’t you think it will take more that a
piece of advanced technology to fix things like having your head examined if
you can’t make that work?
David
Hasselhoff, Julie Kavner, Rachel Dracht, Henry Winkler (all people most heavily
identified with TV) and Sean Astin also star.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot entirely in HD with Panavision
Genesis equipment by Dean Semler, A.C.S, A.S.C., who first made a mark with is
work on the first two Mad Max
Sequels, Young Guns, Dead Calm and Dances With Wolves, before jumping into more commercial fare like XXX.
Occasionally, he has returned to form with We Were Soldiers (reviewed on HD-DVD elsewhere on this site) and
the interesting but hardly seen thriller D-Tox
(aka Eye See You, a murder thriller
with Sylvester Stallone), but he had been moving more towards a digital
aesthetic and recent work like this film, the overly-digitized Stealth and Mel Gibson’s also-all-HD
shoot Apocalypto are just not his
best work. Professional, yes. Great, no way.
The best
sound here is the PCM 16bit/48kHz 5.1 mix that is smooth and solid, though
nothing fancy or special, just once again adequate and professional at
best. With comedy and jokes, this is leaning
on dialogue, but the weakest point outside of lack of character or good
surrounds is the awful music score by Rupert Gregson-Williams. It is condescending, dippy, tired, annoying
and lame. He recently did music for the
British TV series The Last Detective,
which two critics and counting on this site disliked a good bit. Nothing like making something bad worse.
Extras
include deleted scenes, Fine Cookin’ featurette
– Additional "Fat Suit"
footage, Make Me Old and Fat featurette
– behind-the-scenes of the make-up effects, FX of Click – a look at the special
effects and a long feature length
audio commentary with Adam Sandler, Director Frank Coraci, Executive Producer
Tim Herilhy and Writer Steve Koren.
- Nicholas Sheffo
