movie film review | chris tookey
 
     
     
 

Grown Ups 2

 ( 12A)
© Sony Pictures - all rights reserved
     
  Grown Ups 2 Review
Tookey's Rating
1 /10
 
Average Rating
1.91 /10
 
Starring
Adam Sandler , Chris Rock , Kevin James
Full Cast >
 

Directed by: Dennis Dugan
Written by: Adam Sandler, Fred Wolf, Tim Herlihy

 
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Released: 2013
   
Genre: SEQUEL
COMEDY
   
Origin: US
   
Colour: C
   
Length: 101
 
 


 
Even worse than the first one.
Reviewed by Chris Tookey



Grown Ups 2 begins with a deer urinating on Adam Sandler’s face. It ends with Sandler simultaneously farting, belching and sneezing while copulating with Salma Hayek. If humour like that appeals to you, this is your kind of movie.

The central “joke” is that middle-aged men are even more juvenile, foul-mouthed and gross than young people. So we get lots of projectile vomiting, excretion in inappropriate places and more vomiting. Don’t expect story, characterization or comedy.

As in most Sandler movies, there’s a lot of bullying, which we are meant to find amusing. Women exist to be ogled, or - if they do not conform to sexist stereotype - insulted.

It may surprise some people that Grown Ups 2 is the first sequel Adam Sandler has ever made. He often seems to be making the same movie over and over again, gradually increasing its crudeness, homophobia and sexism to ever more objectionable extremes. His fear and hatred of gays seemed to have peaked with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. His love of toilet humour, likewise, with Jack and Jill, which critics united to condemn as the least funny film of 2012.

Astonishingly, Grown Ups 2 manages to outdo them both.

The only good news is that the five friends in the original film have been whittled down to four.

Rob Schneider, hitherto an indestructible perennial in Sandler movies, like some human version of Japanese Knotweed, either read the script and decided unemployment was preferable or did something funny offscreen and was booted off the picture because Sandler couldn’t face the competition. Whatever the explanation, Schneider’s character is nowhere to be seen and is has been purged from the characters’ memories. It all adds to the air of commercial cynicism.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who survived the entirety of Grown Ups really came out demanding a sequel, but the accountants at Sony evidently looked at the bottom line and commissioned it anyway. Like Jack and Jill before it, Grown Ups 2 is not being shown to British critics - not out of any humanitarian impulse, but in the hope that enough punters will flock to see it on its first weekend before word of mouth can wreck it.


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