Starring: Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jared Harris, Peter Gallagher
Director: Steven Brill
The film: After watching the 1936 classic Mr Deeds Comes To Town, director Brill was so impressed he decided that with a little tweaking of the script and his buddy Adam Sandler in the Gary Cooper role, he could make it appeal to a modern audience. Unfortunately, the jokes and plot twists that were so fresh and entertaining in 1936 have since been flogged to death. Brill decided to raise its ghost anyway, and with most of the actors reciting their lines like zombies, it is about as entertaining as a funeral.
Sandler is Longfellow Deeds, a small-town pizza restaurant manager with a sensitive side, who in his spare time writes poems for greetings cards in the hope Hallmark will one day give him his big break. When his great-uncle, media mogul Preston Blake, dies leaving him a controlling stake in his business empire, Deeds trots off to the big smoke. There he falls for Babe Bennett (Ryder), a virgin school nurse who fits his idea of wife material. But guess what? Babe turns out to be an undercover television reporter leaking details of his private life, and the deputies at Blake Media who are advising Deeds are, in fact, Very Bad Men who want to sack all the staff, sell the company and collect the cash. Insert hilarious chaos here. Po-faced businessmen get hit in the face with tennis balls, Deeds slides down a banister and smashes a vase, and cats get thrown out of seventh-floor windows.
There's nothing wrong with slapstick humour, but these jokes are tired and their delivery devoid of emotion. Sandler (above with Ryder) isn't even convincing as the simple-hearted good guy, and his character is prone to inexplicably violent outbursts. It is too far a stretch of the imagination to believe Ryder's character (the best performance out of a bad bunch) sees something endearing in his naivety. Thus the feel-good tearjerker of an ending completely misses its mark.
The extras: The film is not exactly a hard act to follow, but the out-takes, if possible, are even less funny. Roar with laughter as Sandler gets someone's name wrong. Wipe away the tears as he stops short mid-sentence to complain about the camera angle. There is also a Dave Matthews Band video, and three 'featurettes', which include a surprisingly watchable documentary about how the original film was brought up to date.