Jack and Jill

Though slightly better than Just Go With It (if only because it’s shorter), Jack and Jill nevertheless represents yet another complete and total misfire from the once-reliable Adam Sandler – with the film’s abject failure especially disappointing given the strength of its admittedly promising setup. The movie casts Sandler as Jack Sadelstein, a successful advertising executive who must cope with the arrival of his loud-mouthed, socially-inept twin sister (Sandler’s Jill) over the Thanksgiving holiday – with Jack’s ongoing efforts at landing Al Pacino for a pivotal ad campaign first threatened and eventually assisted by his boorish sibling. There’s little doubt that Jack and Jill fares surprisingly well in its opening 15 minutes or so, as filmmaker Dennis Dugan kicks the proceedings off with an amusing credits sequence and subsequently does a nice job of establishing the various characters – with the affable vibe heightened by a series of amusing cameos from folks like Regis Philbin and Dana Carvey. The relatively watchable vibe persists right up until Sandler’s Jill enters the picture, after which point it becomes harder and harder to work up any real interest in any of this – with the actor’s grating and pervasively obnoxious performance effectively bringing the proceedings to a dead stop (ie Jill is simply a reprehensible human being whose mere presence provokes irritation and rage in the viewer). It’s clear, also, that the movie’s progressively interminable atmosphere is exacerbated by a continuing emphasis on misguided, hopelessly unfunny set pieces and interludes, although there’s certainly nothing more intolerable than the false, undeserved sentimentality that begins to crop up just past the one-hour mark (ie we’re supposed to actually care about Jill now?) The end result is a seriously tedious piece of work that will, one can only hope, stand as a wakeup call for Sandler, as the actor must be growing tired of appearing in one bottom-of-the-barrel disaster after another.

*1/2 out of ****