Grown Ups gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately, with Adam Sandler(also co-writer) as Lenny, a super agent to Hollywood's biggest stars. Lenny's got a problem. His kids are soft. They play videog games all day. His extremely hot fashionista of a wife(Salma Hayek), is a fearsome snob. Oh, and Lenny has a nanny. These things prove to be shameful to Lenny. Oh woe is him. 30 years earlier Lenny and his best friends Eric(James), Kurt(Rock), Marcus(Spade), and Rob(Schneider) were all members of a championship winning little league basketball team. Their coach was a supposedly inspiring father figure who encouraged them all to respect eachother and stick together for life. When the coach passes away, these five friends show the respect they had for him by making crass jokes at his funeral. If the coach was such a great guy, how come nobody punched these five jerks in the face?
Reunited for the first time in years, the supposedly close friends bring their families along for a weekend stay at a lakeside cabin over the 4th of July. Each of them come with their own problems and wives in tow. Eric is fortunate enough to be married to Maria Bello, with their chunky kids along for the ride. Kurt gets Maya Rudolph, the breadwinner of the family as he plays the put upon house husband. Marcus is single, so you know it's only a matter of time before he hits on somebody's daughter. And Rob.....well, he's not fortunate to have a hot wife, so he gets the complete opposite for humor's sake: she's old, and decidedly not attractive. Old people, dead people, and fat people all get the butt end of the humor stick.
I'm genuinely at a loss to figure out what the story is supposed to be. Grown Ups comes off as a vanity project amongst buddies. If the entire story was these buddies ad libbing jokes at eachother, this would've been a monster success. Instead, a razor thin plot always intrudes itself in the process, and it's clear that neither Sandler or co-writer Fred Wolf have any interest in pursuing it. Why waste time making us feel like these people have any sort of connection with eachother when it's far more important to show us the dog with the weak bark for the tenth time. They make sure to give you plenty of opportunities to laugh at the same jokes you didn't laugh at the first time around.
Grown Ups makes a half hearted attempt at moralizing by introducing a lazy development involving players from the team they defeated for the championship as kids. I haven't felt this bad for Colin Quinn since Remote Control went off the air, as he and Steve Buscemi grunt their way through humiliating roles that were only included because the story was in desperate need of some drama. Don't even get me started on the forced arguments that crop up out of thin air between the married folks right at the film's conclusion. Swing and a miss.
Sandler, Rock, and James are all funny people. I'm not sold on Schneider, and Spade needs to get wished out into the cornfield sooner rather than later. As a unit, there are some genuinely funny moments of the guys just shootin' the breeze, ribbing eachother like old friends do, and reminiscing in their former glory. These scenes don't feel so scripted and flow pretty naturally. Too bad that couldn't have been the entire movie.
Grown Ups ends with a weak hail mary attempt at meaning, with one of its characters jabbering on about depth emerging in one's later years. They might as well have followed it up with another old lady passing gas.
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